Trailer link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RnyZgfN-JY
HBO has finished staffing the spookier end of Hogwarts for its Harry Potter series. Leo Bill is Nearly Headless Nick, Andrew Brooke is the Bloody Baron, Laura Smyth is the Fat Lady and Daniel Fearn is the Fat Friar, while David Threlfall will voice the Sorting Hat. All of them are in Philosopher’s Stone, the eight-episode first season that arrives on Christmas Day on HBO and, in the UK and Ireland, HBO Max.
Bill has the most famous shoes to fill, or at least the most famous neck. John Cleese played Nick in the films with the right blend of wounded dignity and gloom, and the part is one of the great jokes of the books: a ghost whose execution was bungled so badly that he is stuck in the afterlife with a flap of skin holding his head on. Brooke gets the Slytherin ghost, a silent, bloodstained figure who is the only presence at Hogwarts that Peeves actually fears. Fearn gets the cheerier Hufflepuff Friar. The Fat Lady, the portrait guarding the way into Gryffindor Tower, was played by Elizabeth Spriggs and later Dawn French on screen, so Smyth is joining a very short queue of people who have had to be a painting with opinions.
The Hat is the interesting one. Leslie Phillips voiced it in the films, and Threlfall, best known as Frank Gallagher in Shameless, is a delightfully unexpected successor. Whether the Hat gets to deliver the song it performs in the books, the release doesn’t say, but it’s a role that depends entirely on tone. A hat that has to read an eleven-year-old’s soul in about four seconds needs a voice that sounds as if it has seen worse, and Threlfall has plenty of that.
The rest of the announcement repeats what we already know. Dominic McLaughlin is Harry, Arabella Stanton is Hermione and Alastair Stout is Ron, with John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as McGonagall and Paapa Essiedu as Snape. Francesca Gardiner writes and executive produces, Mark Mylod directs multiple episodes, and J.K. Rowling is among the executive producers. Season two, which adapts Chamber of Secrets, already has Kit Harington lined up as Gilderoy Lockhart.
Two absences are worth noting. Peeves, the poltergeist the films dropped altogether, isn’t mentioned here, which will not please the sort of fan who has spent twenty-five years waiting for him to turn up and throw something. Nor is there a Ravenclaw ghost in the release. Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we feel for the Grey Lady, who is still waiting for HBO to notice her.
Still, with the ghosts, a portrait and a hat in place, the series now has a cheering number of dead people and furniture with speaking parts for a show built around a group of children.
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