In one of the more surprising pieces of casting news in quite some time, HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter TV series has found its Dumbledore. The show, which will be following the original Harry Potter book series and telling the same story as the previous films, is reportedly nearing a deal with beloved actor John Lithgow to play the Hogwarts Headmaster. Lithgow, a two-time Oscar nominee, is widely known for his leading role in 3rd Rock From the Sun and for voicing Lord Farquaad in Shrek.
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While you won’t find many movie or TV fans who dislike Lithgow, the decision to cast him as Dumbledore feels a bit strange. What’s even stranger is that this is the first major casting for the HBO series and and it has already broken arguably the biggest casting rule from the Harry Potter films.
When the Harry Potter movies began casting, there was a lot of talk about the casting process and how the production insisted on every major character being played by an actor from the UK. That went for all the roles throughout all eight of the feature films. If you go look through the IMDb pages of the films, you won’t find any big roles played by an actor outside of England, Ireland, Scotland, etc. The only exceptions, of course, being the characters from wizarding schools in other parts of the world that appeared in Goblet of Fire.
John Lithgow, as you may already know, is American. He was born in New York and was raised in various parts of the United States. Now he’s set to play one of the biggest and most important roles in the new Harry Potter project. Honestly, Dumbledore is probably THE most important adult role in the franchise.
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John Lithgow absolutely has the talent to carry any type of TV show or movie on his back, so there shouldn’t be any concern over his abilities when it comes to playing Albus Dumbledore. It’s just surprising to see such an iconic Harry Potter character get handed to an American actor.
The movies treated all of the characters as if they were James Bond; thoroughly English entities that anyone from the UK would be proud to bring to life. It was made clear that being English was a core part of the characters and that was non-negotiable (even though the first three films were directed by non-English filmmakers).
Out of the gate, the new Harry Potter series is making it clear that things are different this time around, which means the pool of potential stars just got a lot bigger.
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Image courtesy of The CW
