MOVIE NEWS – HBO is moving ahead at full speed with its new Harry Potter adaptation, which means audiences are about to meet an entirely different lineup of actors stepping into the shoes of Hermione Granger, Hagrid, Professor Dumbledore, and the rest of the saga’s most recognizable faces. Of all the casting choices announced so far, few have caused as much noise as Paapa Essiedu taking on Professor Severus Snape, and now Saturday Night Live has decided to have some fun with the backlash.

Essiedu, known from projects like Gangs of London and I May Destroy You, is set to play the Hogwarts Potions Master in the HBO series. The reaction started long before the casting was formally confirmed, when the idea of a Black actor portraying Snape was still floating around as rumor, and once the news became official, the response from the ugliest corner of the fanbase turned vicious. Essiedu was hit with death threats, while several actors from the original Harry Potter films openly condemned the racist abuse that followed.

With the first trailer for the new series now circulating, the project has jumped back into the spotlight, and the latest Saturday Night Live, hosted by Jack Black, decided not to ignore it. During Weekend Update, comedian Kam Patterson showed up in character as Snape and joked that the new casting makes people look at the events of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a little differently. His angle was brutally simple: for most of Harry’s first year, the boy who lived was essentially running around telling everyone that the only Black teacher at the school had to be secretly evil.

SNL Turned a Real Casting Controversy Into a Very Pointed Joke

Patterson kept pushing the bit by suggesting that this sort of thing apparently happens all the time in the Wizarding World, quipping that on his first day people immediately assumed he must be the professor of the Dark Arts. The sketch was obviously playing loose with the finer details of the canon, since book readers know Snape actually wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts position and was repeatedly denied it, but that only made the joke more shamelessly direct.

Still in character, Patterson also took aim at Kingsley Shacklebolt, one of the story’s very few Black characters, saying his name sounded like something pulled from a Wu-Tang name generator. Colin Jost piled on by deadpanning that, for the first time ever, he was beginning to suspect J. K. Rowling might be problematic, an unmistakable nod to the author’s long-running anti-trans controversies. The idea that casting a Black actor as Snape could shift some of the story’s underlying dynamics has been floating around ever since Essiedu’s name entered the conversation, and SNL chose to tackle that angle with a joke that was light on the surface but sharp underneath. Exactly how HBO’s Harry Potter series handles that dynamic will become clear this Christmas, when the show is set to premiere.

Source: MovieWeb