WB raised eyebrows this week with a new report from Deadline that Paapa Essiedu is signing his contract to play Severus Snape in the upcoming HBO Harry Potter series. First, he’s way too handsome. Second, the race of the character is being changed, which in and of itself may not seem important, but when you know the source material, this will lead to scenes like say, a young, white James Potter hanging a now young, black Snape from a tree upside down in a fit of bullying for flirting with his white girlfriend which is…obviously optically problematic.
But now questions turn to how WB is going to handle Hermione, where the character’s casting with a black actress almost feels like a foregone conclusion. With Harry no doubt staying white and Ron Weasley and his family likely not losing their ginger identification, that leaves Hermione in the main trio. Despite this in no way being conveyed in the books and definitely not in the movies with Emma Watson, JK Rowling later went on to say that Hermione could be black, as she never specified it one way or another. But this became more than a hypothetical with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play where black actress Noma Dumezweni played Hermione, and was subject to racism and harassment as a result.
A number of issues would stem from Hermione being cast as black, again, from the source material. Hermione is repeatedly bullied by the Aryan Wizard-coded Draco Malfoy as being a “Mudblood,” effectively a racial slur for a witch who comes from a non-magical family, but even the makeup of the word would carry a clear, different racial component now. Then there’s an entire plotline of Hermione being gaslit as she tries to free enslaved House Elves which again, would be transformed into something with far different implications with this casting.
Finally, putting all this on what will be a young, unknown child actor feels almost dangerous, given the vitriol of the internet over how a change like this would be received.
Should this not happen because of these issues? Like the Snape casting, it feels like these changes are being made in a way that may promote diversity at the cost of not realizing the potentially racist source material storylines that this would create. So, either those air and are uncomfortable in a way they were never intended to be, or those aspects are simply cut, which is not a great solution, alternatively.
It is understandable to want to diversify the overwhelmingly white cast of the Harry Potter series to some extent, but choosing these characters specifically creates issues for both the story and the actors themselves that do not seem to be getting considered. It is possible to imagine any number of other characters that could instead be black (or other races who were underrepresented in the original story) without these sorts of problems with the source material through no fault of the actors. We’ll see what happens, but I am concerned even more about how this will all play out with Hermione and her young actress if this does come to pass.
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