HBO Is Making All The ‘Harry Potter’ Show’s Grown-Up Stars Younger (And Hotter)

It occurred to me recently, when HBO dropped another batch of casting reveals for its upcoming Harry Potter TV series, that the casting strategy is pretty obvious at this point: Cast the most attractive people possible for nearly every single adult role.

I’m not suggesting that there weren’t attractive actors in the Harry Potter movies, but the hotness factor was dialed way down in favor of strong character actors who often had more outlandish features. Alan Rickman was not an unattractive man by any means, but his features lent his version of Snape a pallid quality that pretty perfectly matched the book character. There’s something a little larger than life about Rickman’s Snape. The show’s casting choice, Paapa Essiedu (pictured above), is a talented actor but is both younger and better-looking than Rickman. Essiedu is 34 while Rickman was already 54 when the first movie began filming.

Now let’s take a look at the Dursleys. This is Bel Powley as Petunia Dursley and Daniel Rigby as Vernon Dursley

This is quite the stark contrast to Fiona Shaw and Richard Griffiths, who were both much older. The movie Vernon was quite a lot heavier as well. Again, this is not to say that Shaw isn’t a beautiful woman, but she was also a decade older than Powley when she first played Petunia, and neither Dursley was prettied up for the films (of course, Powley and Rigby will undoubtedly look different in the series than they do in their headshots).

Many, though not all, of the cast have been aged-down considerably, which actually makes sense given how old they were supposed to be in the books and how old they are supposed to be relative to their co-stars. It made little sense to have Petunia and Snape in their fifties, or Professor Lupin in his late 40s. Gary Oldman was about a decade older than Sirius Black would have been, but he was still the perfect casting choice because he’s always the perfect casting choice.

Johnny Flynn who plays Lucius Malfoy is 42, which is actually a few years older than Jason Isaacs was when he first appeared in the Harry Potter films. Janet McTeer, who plays Professor McGonagall, is about the same age Maggie Smith was in 2001. Katherine Parkinson, who plays Mrs. Weasley, is several years younger than Julie Walters was at the time of the first film. It certainly makes more sense to cast actors in the parent’s generation closer to their ages in the books and to one another. I suspect the casting will reflect this when it comes to other adults who were contemporaries at Hogwarts, like Lupin and Black and other as-of-yet unannounced choices.

Of course, as a longtime fan of Harry Potter, the reality is that I’m really just coming to terms with the fact that while I may have been a teenager when I began reading the books, I am now in the parent’s generation. Older than any of them were in the books, actually. I’m older than the new version of Snape, the Dursleys and Lucius Malfoy. I’m just a tiny bit younger than Mrs. Weasley and Cornelius Fudge. It’s a bit unsettling, but then again that’s how it goes. You get old and things change.