Even before 'don't these guys know another little person who could act not called Warwick Davis Flitwick?' frankly the secret of the Harry Potter series success is that there is no reason why McGonagall could not be played by a little person (provided she's Scottish) or a minority (ditto).
Amusingly there are at most six characters whose physical appearance is crucial to their character and to the book's themes and *that* is the only role they have done something off-book and off-the Columbus movies:
Who are your six? Snape, Dudley, Dumbledore, Fleur, arguably Neville (though I think he could be scrawny as easily as fat and it would work). I do feel the Weasleys must have red hair.
The Weasleys must have red hair (I used to like the idea of making them British Indian in an adaptation, but I just think it makes the subtext of what Rowling is writing about snobbery and racism so crushingly obvious it is is wearying) but would do that with dye and wigs, I think.
Mine would be Snape, Dudley, Fleur, Dumbledore, James Potter*, plus wriggle room for anyone I've forgotten in the later books. I think Neville just has to look 'unfortunate', as it were. *I might be overreading but I think 'charming, very attractive, but a bit of a shit' is key to James
Very good point on James - fully agree. And yes, wigs fine for Weasleys.
He can be tubbier than his friends, he can be gangly, it doesn't matter, the actor just needs to be *awkward*. It's IMO the hardest part to cast because it requires the best actor in the first and it's a sign of how much Columbus knew what he was doing that Lewis is one of the best actors from it.
In the original films, Neville's 'honest but basically inept' character was conveyed by *checks notes* making him vaguely northern. And sweaters.
Yeah Neville is I'm pretty sure more muscular in the later films than in the books but he works in the first. (May also be another of the characters who are blonde in the books and dark haired in the films?)
My headcanon as a kid was always that Voldemort only looks like that post-resurrection and he was if anything very physically attractive at the point he killed James and Lily, and I genuinely think that holds up as an artistic choice
Agree - I mean, Tom Riddell is attractive. (Tom also looks a bit like Harry, it's IMO key to why both Harry and Ginny trust him when they shouldn't in Chamber of Secrets.)
Tbh I think Paapa Essiedu works for Voldemort although part of me thinks you may as well go all I know writers who use subtext and they’re cowards and make him look like Reinhard Heydrich Hasn’t considered him looking like Harry actually, good point
Yeah, I mean, I think given they've set themselves the crackers task of stretching them out over eight hours, absolutely the right route is to go for the 'who use subtext and they're cowards' route because it's the only area you are getting more good material from.
You can't make the 'world' deeper, because the world is 'JKR needed it to be a boarding school so that the parents wouldn't get in the way, a school every kid can see themselves in plus locations that fitted the story JKR wanted to tell plus her gamely entertaining kids on World Book Day'.
And yet Neville turned out to be a wonderful actor too and wound up seeing on stage in some diverse roles!
Not 'and yet'! It's the most demanding role in the books and plot points that Columbus knew about at the time of casting and there is a reason that he puts a big gun there.
Has to be comic, carry off the bravery of facing off against his friends (a scene where sadly none of the core trio act to his level), then capable of carrying off the real tragedy of visiting his parents - these are things that frankly none of the core trio could have done until four films in.
Was that scene known at the time? I feel that was in book 5 which I think came out later.
True esp as those stage roles were all a lot closer to the films than say Dan doing Sondheim decade plus later
Gingerface?
I knew my Harry Potter threads would lead to me getting cancelled, I just didn't predict it would be like this.
I just want to know who I should be contacting to collect my shakedown money for not trying to make this a thing. (L'Oréal probably)
So the Weasleys are like the Harkonnens ?
The casting has a really clear before and after, in that before they decided to cast a hunky black man as Snape (a British guy who is decidedly not hunky who obsesses about his ancestry and lineage) they also cast Lithgow, and since then all the casting has been incredibly down the line and boring.
My guess would be that they thought that the backlash to the Snape casting was a sign that they had to be 'true to the book' not people going 'did you miss the parallel to racism that is literally so unsubtle *A CHILD* is meant to pick up on it and is important for this one bit of casting?'
But it means that there's now this funny dynamic of 'Dean Thomas, whose character beats are liking football, being good at art, and dating Ginny, must be black. Flitwick, must be a little person, in fact the same little person we hired last time. The weedy racist, however, can be a hunky black man'.
Not that it seems likely that they'll get to filming the fifth book anyway, but it'd be fascinating to see how much worse the "Harry's father horrifically bullied Snape with his rich friends but it's all good, he's a great guy and Snape sucks" beat from the books will land with that casting choice.
And part of the bullying is, uh, Harry's dad hoisting him into the air in a fit of jealousy over him being a romantic rival for a (persumably) white woman
bsky.app/profile/stor...
One of the many things that is compelling about it is that increasingly I am convinced they have only read as far as the third book, if that.
Like, I haven't read them in over a decade and it occurred to me, you'd hope the scriptwriters' first act would be to read the whole thing through. And yet!
I don’t think it helps that James’s characterisation changes rather sharply between books 3 and 5 - prior to that he’s always presented as Fred/George prankster who had a reciprocated hatred of Snape, whereas from book 5 the bullying/bad behaviour is presented as very one sided.
A bit of a problem seeing as they are trying to pad out a thin-by-deliberate-design world that they've decided to get rid of the proper bit of depth in it.
Of course that goes back to the thing which is compelling and funny about this project, which it essentially runs on the Disco Stu logic of 'every extra minute of Harry Potter makes us more money!'
I remember reading somewhere that one of the chief tensions in the Star Wars IP is that 'Lightsabers are the best-selling toy, we need more' and 'there was a genocide in our plotline of people that owned lightsabers'.
In 1983 we knew there were between 1-2 Jedi left depending on what you thought might happen to Leia. In 2005 we found out what happened to the others. From 2013 onwards there are hundreds of the bastards, you trip over a Jedi in every one-bantha desert town
”The Jedi were a jaded, atrophied, myopic institution that utterly failed to defend the republic against the rise of evil. Doesn’t that sound like a great Halloween costume, Timmy?“
They were none of those things. They lost, but that doesn't mean they had it coming.
Also available: Franz Von Papen, ages 5+
I read the headline as "Warwick Davis not about to pass up a check."
Sure, it's great business for the actors, the designers, for basically everyone who gets paid upfront. It's bad business for WB-HBO.
I'm down with that.
like surely the star wars sequel trilogy trope of "using your fantasy world to say something extremely basic about contemporary white radicalisation to score media points" was there for them
cast someone who looks like Stephen Miller as snape? Have someone talk about "putting wizardkind first"? It wouldn't be good but it's something
I do like how basically, it's a really hard project that at every stage it feels like they've gone 'no, we'll do this the hardest possible way'.
This is when I randomly find out that Dean is canonically Black - mentioned exactly once - in the American edition of the books thanks to a cut line being reinstated. Just after discussing the whole strange topic of divergent US and UK editions of YA and genre books on here yesterday.
"We thought the films were perfect, except Alan Rickman was just too damn pale"
There is only one little person in the whole world available for TV. Well two, but Peter Dinklage wouldn't do it.
They could always do what the Snow White remake did and use deepfakes to transplant an average-height actor's head onto an uncanny valley CGI body. I'm sure no-one would object to that
Or they could just cast someone short. Flitwick doesn't canonically have dwarfism (or is a goblin in HP world, as that's how were cast). He's short as might have that heritage. You could cast Danny DeVito or Jason Alexander if you so wished.
Though unfortunately if you asked them that question they'd probably just say 'you mean like Peter Dinklage?'
I'm wondering if part of the reason for bringing back Davis was difficulty in casting someone else. Not because of a lack of actors who fit the description but because of a lack of actors who fit the description and would take the role.
Using Warwick Davis again is all about saving money on talent for the sequel, ‘Harry Potter v Starwars - Return of the Ewoks’
Azkaban of Courage: An Ewok Adventure
Brilliant! 😆
:the revenge of Bavmorda
