Casting News for Harry Potter TV Show?!

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The rumour mill has been flying about the new Harry Potter TV show lately, specifically two big casting stories. Brett Goldstein as Hagrid, and Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape.

Here are my thoughts about them as options for these characters, and my thoughts on the comments the rumours have caused.

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Also, this brings a possible complication. He would be a black kid getting bullied by a white kid. Him being black would have a domino effect, even if the show doesn’t address it

Anna-B
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Except:
- Snape’s lips were shaking, his face was white, his teeth were bared.
- As Gryffindors came spilling onto the field, he saw Snape land nearby, white faced and tight lipped.
- Snape's face was like a death mask. It was marble white.

Maria_Bar
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I can't believe they rejected the 42-year-old man's Hermione audition. Talk about racist and sexist casting.

dracom_zang
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saying “the movies weren’t accurate either” as a justification for being inaccurate AGAIN is insane. this show is justified as a more faithful adaptation than the movies were! that’s the whole point!

MADAMEJANAANIUTA
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Honestly, I feel like he would be a good casting role for Kingsley Shacklebolt

YeahNah_Mate
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it says in the book snape has ghostly white skin and long jet black hair

badboytomas
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As a person of South Asian heritage, I don't like race swapping characters as it doesn't address the diversity issue for me, it feels forced. When I read the books, I noticed the lack of diversity less as I felt like the proportions matched the UK in the 1990s. I would much rather prefer if they spent more time on the existing minority ethnic characters already in the books who were barely in the movies or added in new characters. With more time due to the TV show format and the fact that there are only about 30 kids in Harry's year (and potentially only 210 in the entire school), they could add more characters. If they were to race swap, I feel like they should stick as close to the books as possible. Snape's description of sallow skin, greasy hair (which is only possible on straight or wavy hair types) and a hooked nose could be interpreted as someone with middle-eastern or south asian heritage.

shilly_
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I respect your opinion, but, to me, all factors point to Snape being a white man. J.K. portrayed the character to look similar to her own chemist teacher, who had the black curtains, a longer (but maybe not the over-the-top hooked) nose, and was indeed white. She’s also made a scribble of exactly how she imagined Snape back in 1993 (I believe), where he definitely is white. I can’t really recall an example off the top of my head when the colour of his skin is explicitly mentioned apart from in Deathly Hallows when he's speaking with Voldemort in the Shrieking Shack, where it’s described as marble white. 

That being said, even if his skin colour wasn’t mentioned at all, J.K. makes it clear in the books when someone is definitively black. Her exact words for depicting Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson, and Kingsley Shacklebolt were ”black boy”, ”black girl", and ”black man", respectively. She doesn’t say that someone is a ”white boy” or a ”white girl” or so on. Why? Because the story takes place in Britain in the 90s, and therefore everyone is basically assuming, unless something else is said, that the character in question is white. When you’re describing someone, you’re pointing out the most distinguishable features about them, what sets them apart from others, and she deliberately emphasised that these characters were black.

Why the skin colour of a character, generally speaking, is more important to get right compared to, for example, age, eye colour, or buck teeth is due to its simple identifiability. I mean, if you're a witness to a crime, one of the first questions the police officers ask to help them find the criminal is their race. If you noticed the criminal’s general age, gender, or eye colour, you absolutely noticed what the colour of their skin was.

DumbGenius
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"Who cares" - We do

Brett it's okay to say that it's not accurate to the books. Saying "Who cares" to a small, but still meaningful aspect of what makes a character's appearance as described in the books when you have made all of these videos about how each season can be as close and accurate to the books as possible shows that your statement is coming from either a place of fear (from backlash) or something else.

Николай-ьшх
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Appearance plays a significant role in shaping a character, and altering it affects how the story resonates and how they are perceived and understood.

laiacortes
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Would you dare cast any of the black characters as white? Let's see the double standard. Let the Marauders who all died fighting a magical Hitler be racist for bullying Snape, why not!

dza_kicuf
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I think the real issue with snape being black brings on racism people will say he was bullied or that lily didn’t like him because of racism also I think Voldemort was probably Racist and wouldn’t be so close with snape

the_speed_attack
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Snape was described as pale -
(From Wikipedia)

"A Black person can appear paler than usual due to conditions like anemia (low blood iron) causing a lack of oxygen in the blood, which can make any skin tone appear pale"

-and I can't imagine Snape suffering from anemia.

Shafiqaakhter-yi
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I would vastly prefer a more book accurate actor. I don’t have a problem slight differences and changes, but not major ones.

Anna-B
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You would really have to make clear that white teenage boys bullying a black teenage boy had nothing to do with racism.
In the wizarding world racism in our sense does not exist. Its replaced by discrimination based on blood status (pure-blood, half-blood, mud-blood, blood traitor) or other forms of human existence (Half-giant, Werewolf, …). But the general audience does not know this. So the show would have to explain this. But how?

I can only see 2 options:
- Breaking the 4th wall by a narrator who explains how the world works (would be weird and lame)
- You make at least one of the Marauders also Black (and risk creating another backlash by fans)

Maybe I'm closed minded but I just prefer a 100% faithful adaption of the books including how characters looked. And I always took Snape's description as him being white (it has nothing to do with Alan Rickman's portrayal). So it's really hard to imagine him otherwise.

I agree with you that choosing an actor who looks like 30 is really important.

Prodrummer
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My main issue with Paapa Essiedu is that it doesn’t make sense for Death Eaters to be POCs when they’re basically an allegory for white supremacists, but I also just think Snape’s character is improved by being a pale, greasy white boy who doesn’t look like he ever goes outside. I’m sure he’s a talented actor, the race swap just opens a can of worms that I would need them to address in the writing, but I’m open to it, I’m not one of those people who’s gonna boycott the show over something like this lol

nairrdlairrd
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5:10 The issue lies in the fact that the series promotes itself as striving to stay faithful to the books. When a casting choice doesn't align with the character's physical description as detailed in the source material, it feels like a discouraging start — especially since they haven't even begun filming yet. Unlike the films, which had the flexibility to take significant artistic liberties and deviate from the books, this series is being marketed as one that will remain closely aligned with the original text. With that in mind, I can’t help but feel disappointed and skeptical about whether the series will truly be a faithful representation of the books, despite it being very early days of course.

IG-cu
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This is going to be a disaster. Recasting characters based off skin color and calling hagrid a comic relif character is.... Amazon's Rings of Power 2.0 incoming

freehashbrowns
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Do you really think jk rowling was thinking of a black man when writing snape? I mean seriously?

zach
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If we're going with a black Snape, does that mean we're gonna have blonde Weasleys as well...?

DonkeyFrostMC