Will HBO Now Have To Rewrite Awkward Hermione And Snape Storylines?

HBO finally announced who would play its core cast members, Harry, Ron and Hermione, in its upcoming Harry Potter series, a re-adaptation of the books, reboots the old series of films that rocketed its core cast to stardom.

Now, fans fear culture war backlash for a few of the cast roles, namely Paapa Essiedu cast as Severus Snape, and now the young Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger. Essiedu is black, and while Stanton looks almost exactly like a young Emma Watson, it appears she isn’t white, and that’s enough to cause unfortunate controversy.

The accusations of “race swapping” originally white characters are frequent in media, and as a whole, not legitimate casting complaints. However, in this situation, because it is these specific Potter characters who are now not white, that raises questions about how specific bits of source material will be handled given the events that took place in the books and films, and how those might take on new, unforseen racial dynamics with this casting.

For Essiedu’s Snape, his story eventually leads to the revelation that he was relentlessly bullied by James Potter back in the ‘70s, hung upside down with magic at one point, and pining after Lily, James’ eventual wife. That bullying and love triangle takes on a new dimension with Essiedu being one of the only cast members of color as now it’s confirmed that will not be the case with either Potter parent. It’s an uncomfortable dynamic when you think about how that’s going to play out onscreen.

For Hermione, we are going to get into awkward territory when there is an entire storyline about her starting a movement to free house elves from slavery, something that’s laughed off by everyone else as a dumb cause. Past that, Hermione is a frequent target of attacks about her genealogy. She’s called a “mudblood,” an slur about her non-magical parents producing a magic child, but calling a young, non-white girl a “mudblood” seems…different in that context.

It is the case that the house elf storyline was already cut from the films, not for controversy reasons, but because there was just not enough time to include that side-story (though the big moment of Dobby being accidentally freed was still in the adaptation when it came time for that).

As for Hermione being attacked for her heritage and Snape being bullied by James Potter, that seems harder to get around. One argument is that they can claim all this is actually a metaphor for racial injustice and that Harry Potter is being smart and progressive with that commentary, but it’s impossible to believe that was ever the actual intent of the story. Sure, the Malfoys are in effect more or less pureblood Aryan stand-ins, but this is also a series that had almost no minority characters at all and none in major roles.

It is laudable that the cast is going to be more inclusive, but with the specific characters that were chosen here, and only those characters, from what it seems, this is going to be more complicated than I think they realize, and we will have to see how this is handled.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.