MOVIE NEWS – A studio boss has revealed how the HBO Harry Potter TV series will avoid ageing actors between seasons.

The HBO Harry Potter TV series is slowly approaching its biggest challenge: casting a new cast of stars for the roles they will have to play over several years. In doing so, very young actors will take over the roles of the titular wizard and his Hogwarts companions, and this comes with the complication that the production must somehow manage the unavoidable ageing of these actors faster than their characters.

In many productions, young actors have spent up to ten years in long-term roles, while their characters have only aged a few years – for example, in the original Harry Potter films and the Netflix series Stranger Things. Even series like Sex Education have challenged how believable it is for actors in their late twenties to play college students. For the new Harry Potter series, it looks like HBO has a plan to help overcome some of the issues, and that’s good news for those who have been eagerly anticipating the new iteration of J.K. Rowling’s novels.

According to Casey Bloys, HBO’s head of content, there have been a lot of discussions about how the long-running series can handle the challenge of age-matching the young actors to the characters in the universe, and it looks like part of the plan will be that they are fully invested in shooting multiple seasons in quick succession. According to TVLine, Bloys explained:

“It is something we’re thinking about. One of the ideas we talked about was shooting the first season and the second season very close to each other time-wise, because 11 to 13 is a big jump in kids’ lives. You can get away with 13 to 15, something like that. So we’re going to have to think about scheduling and shooting so that they don’t grow too much between seasons. It is a consideration.”

Fans have mixed feelings about the new HBO Harry Potter adaptation

The original Harry Potter films were released between 2001 and 2011, before the franchise expanded with the Fantastic Beasts film trilogy. Many fans – and former Potter actors – have questioned why the franchise is being rebooted just over a decade after the films ended.

Apart from the usual reason – there’s a big, big pile of money to be made – the biggest reason for reworking the Harry Potter saga is that for the sake of the film adaptation, many of the novels ended up having to be severely cut to fit the acceptable runtimes of the films. In the case of the new series, according to the plans, one book per season would be adapted.

Especially in the case of the first six novels, this would mean up to eight extra hours to tell each story.

Of course, there are a number of other reasons why the TV series may end up surpassing expectations. Even though it’s not a major motion picture, Warner Bros. will be investing heavily in this and other big IP deals. This suggests that there will be major advances in special effects compared to the early films. The new iteration also allows HBO to rethink some of the character designs that may not have exactly matched the descriptions of the characters in the books – an annoyance that many readers face with any adaptation of their favourite novels.

However, the production is overshadowed by several things, such as the frequent online bickering between Potter creator J.K. Rowling and fans who do not share the writer’s increasingly iron-clad, openly transphobic views. Although Rowling is involved in the creation of the new series, Warner Bros. has tried to steer the conversation away from the writer’s controversy at press conferences, and they will continue to follow that path when production actually begins next year.

Source: TVLine