What's bleakly funny about it is it is such a 'once you've done this, you have no good choices', in that all of the casting changes you can make that would *not* make the 1972 bit feel awful are a decision tree where you have either 'deeply cringe' or 'people send death threats to a child actor'.
Some corners of the Internet got really nasty about the stage play having a black Hermionie (I got letters just for writing a piece about it!) and that was a) focused on an adult and b) a stage play!
Right, this is the thing, also colour-blind casting can be appropriate, but also sometimes it can't. Chiwetel Ejiofor as Voldemort? Sure I think you can make that work. Hell, in a couple of years, Paapa Essiedu as Voldemort, basically any Shakespearean actor with presence can do that.
David Dawson would absolutely destroy as Snape. Doesn't quite have the Rickman gravitas, but could alsolutely walk away with the underlying sadness and need.
yeah I can see that. If you move the setting forwards to contemporary, in particular, it works. You lose the specific analogs of Voldemort and the original Death Eaters being 1970s NF/neo-Nazis but that's hardly essential, and 99% of readers never got that bit anyway.
Indeed. The flipside of course is that losing that does run up against 'we want to make a faithful, 10 hour per book series' in that you really don't want to be chucking out anything you can plausibly usefully mine for length.
My problem is with the buffness. Snape wasn't buff. And he didn't get down the gym after being bullied by James. And he didn't take some Captain America potion either. He remained unbuff.
Yeah. I do think one reason why Alan Rickman is the hardest piece to replace is that the Venn diagram of 'Hollywood pretty' and 'not obviously ridiculous in that role' is, uh, not large!
Every now and then the Internet gets caught up on a piece of casting in a stage play and goes heavy weird about it. I remember midway through last year various people got very riled about the fact that Francesca Amewudah-Rivers was in a production of Romeo and Julier opposite Tom Holland.
The Internet means too many people who have never and will never see a play, and have no concept of the conventions of the medium, can get angry about plays.
I vividly remember someone getting very emotional to me about how this was a sacrilege to the original text and "they would never have cast her in Shakespeare's day".
To which I replied. "You are absolutely right, so what boy would you cast as Juliet?"
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To which I replied. "You are absolutely right, so what boy would you cast as Juliet?"