HBO has released the first character posters for Harry, Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the opening season of its book-a-year retelling. The internet has responded as it always does to a new picture of three eleven-year-olds holding sticks: it zoomed in until it found something to be cross about.
The posters are a matching set. Dominic McLaughlin as Harry, Arabella Stanton as Hermione and Alastair Stout as Ron each stand in Hogwarts uniform in front of a warm, book-lined library, holding a wand bolt upright down the middle of the frame. The tagline is “The First Year Begins”, which has the virtue of being both accurate and unlikely to be leaked by anyone. It is a composition that could have sat on the front of a Puffin paperback in about 1987, give or take the lens flare, and it follows last month’s first official poster, which showed Hogwarts reflected in Harry’s round spectacles over the words “The Boy Who Lived”.
Not everyone is charmed. A noisy corner of social media has decided the images have been retouched to within an inch of their lives, with one sharp-eyed viewer complaining that Ron appears to be wearing two different lip colours. Whether that is the work of an overtired designer in Burbank or a Weasley twin with a new jinx is impossible to say from here. In fairness to the three young actors, being airbrushed into eerie smoothness for a marketing campaign is a rite of passage in the film business. They’ve simply had to endure it before their voices have broken.
Behind the gloss, the casting has a pleasingly British pedigree. Stanton played the title role in Matilda the Musical in the West End, so she has already done a long stint as the cleverest child in a building full of unhelpful adults, which is decent preparation for Hermione. McLaughlin previously turned up in the Sky comedy Grow opposite Nick Frost, who is now his Hagrid, so at least one of them knows the other won’t sit on him. For Stout, this is his first major role, and what a way to start: a decade-long contract and a family of red-headed siblings who will mostly be eating his lines.
The facts, for those who skipped straight to the lip-gloss controversy, are these. The first season runs to eight episodes and premieres on 25 December on HBO, streaming on HBO Max, which reached the UK earlier this year. HBO has already renewed it for Chamber of Secrets. Francesca Gardiner writes and runs the show, Mark Mylod directs several episodes, and the grown-ups include John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as McGonagall and Paapa Essiedu as Snape. Here at SFcrowsnest we’ve followed the slow drip of casting news since the earlier teasers, and HBO’s marketing department has been about as patient as a Hogwarts portrait waiting for the password.
A Christmas Day launch puts Hogwarts up against the King’s speech, a Bond film nobody chose and the traditional post-lunch doze. It’s a confident slot. Nobody judged the 2001 film by its one-sheet either, and if the worst thing HBO does between now and Christmas is push the skin-smoothing slider a little too far, the school will be in better hands than it was under Gilderoy Lockhart.
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