HBO Casts A Spall, A Ghost And A Boy With A Camera, And Appears To Have Cast Ginny Weasley Twice
Warner Bros. have pinged over another casting bulletin for the HBO Harry Potter series, and season two is now officially stocked with a Weasley patriarch, a bathroom-dwelling poltergeist, and the most dangerous man in Hogwarts: a twelve-year-old with a camera.
Rafe Spall takes Arthur Weasley, which means the Spall family has now colonised the wizarding world across two separate adaptations and two separate generations, his father Timothy having previously spent several films as a man who turns into a rat. Whatever the Spalls are doing, they should keep doing it. Molly Hewitt-Richards plays Moaning Myrtle, a role that requires an actor to spend an entire career’s worth of emotional range inside a U-bend, and Jasper Ambrose is Colin Creevey, the original content creator, a lad who understood personal branding roughly sixteen years before Instagram and who would absolutely have had a Patreon.
The press release also helpfully reprints the full season one cast, which at this point reads less like a call sheet and more like the electoral roll for a mid-sized English market town. John Lithgow, Janet McTeer, Paapa Essiedu, Nick Frost, Warwick Davis, Paul Whitehouse, Johnny Flynn, Bertie Carvel, Katherine Parkinson, Anton Lesser. There are theatre companies that would be delighted with a tenth of that. There are countries that would be delighted with a tenth of that. Somewhere in a Soho office there is a casting director who has not slept since 2024 and who flinches whenever a fax machine makes a noise.
Season two additions previously announced include Kit Harington as Gilderoy Lockhart, which is inspired, because Lockhart is fundamentally a man whose entire personality is a publicity still, and Harington has spent a decade being photographed looking windswept and troubled. Lenny Rush is Dobby. Billy Barratt is Tom Riddle. And Bonnie Hill is Ginny Weasley.
Which is where I got my reading glasses out, because seventeen lines earlier the same email lists Gracie Cochrane as Ginny Weasley. Two Ginnys. Two entirely separate performers, one role, one press release. Now, the boring explanation is that Ginny is barely a walk-on in the first book and becomes rather load-bearing in the second, so a recast is perfectly sensible television practice. But I prefer to believe the Burrow simply has more Weasleys than anybody has ever successfully counted, and that Molly has quietly lost track. It would explain a great deal about that family.
Francesca Gardiner writes and executive produces, Mark Mylod directs multiple episodes, and the whole thing is made in association with Brontë Film and TV and Warner Bros. Television, with J.K. Rowling, Neil Blair, Ruth Kenley-Letts and David Heyman executive producing. The season one logline insists there is nothing special about Harry Potter, which is a bold position to take in the marketing materials for an eight-season television adaptation of the bestselling children’s books in publishing history, but I admire the commitment to the bit.
No transmission date for season two, obviously. They’re still filming season one. At the current rate of press releases we will have met every named portrait on the Hogwarts staircase before anyone has seen a single frame.
