New HBO 'Harry Potter' Illustrates Why Woke Casting Falls Flat
In trying to modernize Harry Potter, HBO forgot the cardinal rule: story first.
The biggest fight Harry Potter faces isn’t Voldemort, it’s the combined outrage of the political right, left, and center.
The cast of HBO’s new Harry Potter leaked recently, and it's already stirring up controversy. Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout, and Arabella Stanton will play Harry, Ron, and Hermione respectively. McLaughlin looks close enough to avoid pushback, but it’s Stout and Stanton who raised eyebrows.
Stout shocked people by, ironically, looking accurate to the Ron from the books. He’s red-haired and white, a relief to those concerned he would fall to the so-called “Great Redhead Replacement.”
Several recent pieces of media have swapped characters who were originally redheads for black people. Normies, those not plugged into the thrumming online culture war, began to notice as well leading to somewhat tongue-in-cheek rumors of a shadowy anti-ginger agenda in the industry.
Thus, Ron’s actor bucks the trend and stands out given HBO’s other casting choices.
Hermione was the obvious candidate for race-swapping. Her identity has been retconned so thoroughly that many now expect her to be black. Hermione was portrayed by black actress Noma Dumezweni in the original London production Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; a casting choice that has now become the norm.
Before being cast out by her leftist peers over trans issues, Potter author J.K. Rowling claimed Hermione’s race was never specified, and Dumezweni was simply the best actress for the role.
Ignoring the fact that Rowling did in fact use language in the books that referred to Hermione as white and drew her as such in original illustrations, the decision to cast a non-white actress for Hermione in this new HBO show and the far more egregious casting decision to cast a black man to play potions master Severus Snape leads to unfortunate political connotations that wouldn’t have existed had they just left the damn characters alone.
A favored insult of Potter nemesis Draco Malfoy is “mudblood,” an epithet he hurls at Hermione based on her non-magical Muggle parents. The slur hits differently if she's non-white, changing from a classist attack to something invariably racially charged.
The optics worsen with Snape, who is played by the unmistakably black Paapa Essidou in HBO’s version.
In an episode from Snape’s past, it’s revealed that Harry’s father James Potter, alongside Marauders Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, relentlessly tormented Snape including an incident where they hang him up in a tree. The episode is meant to demonstrate that Harry’s father et. al. weren’t as clean cut as he might have wanted to believe, but that they eventually grew and became a better people.
Now, with a black actor playing Snape, that scene inevitably looks like a racially motivated lynching.
If Harry is white, so is his father. We’re watching a white man string up a black one. Whoops!
It doesn’t take a genius to work out why these optics are utterly terrible. Harry’s dad and co are no longer flawed bullies; they’re straight up white supremacists. A lot harder to root for than stupid kids making childhood mistakes.
Now HBO might soften the scene or cut it entirely. It’s the same with Malfoy. He might not refer to Hermione as a “mudblood” or his insults might be less tinged with blood-based animus. But if they sanitize his insults, they neuter his character and gut the original characterization.
Could these changes work? Sure, why not. But they’re entirely avoidable problems HBO invited on themselves by race swapping the Snape and Hermione in the first place.
Somehow, everyone hates this show. The left despises Rowling for her views on the trans issue. The right sees DEI all over the show. Normies wonder why HBO is rebooting a franchise that ended within living memory.
Why piss off two segments of the viewing audience in an attempt to placate the third? It’s the same lazy diversity checkboxes we’ve come to expect from organizations like this except this time it came with some unforeseen consequences.
In trying to modernize Harry Potter, HBO forgot the cardinal rule: story first. If every casting choice turns into a political statement to virtue signal instead of telling a coherent story, that’s going to please no one.
The Boy Who Lived may have survived Voldemort, but he’s probably not getting out of this reboot.