Harry Potter TV Show Actor Already Says They May Not Return for Season 2

While HBO’s Harry Potter TV series reboot won’t premiere until next year, speculation is already taking place regarding Season 2. And it’s not just the fans who are making predictions and hedging their bets about how the remake of J.K. Rowling’s juggernaut fantasy series will unfold. Bertie Carvel, who will play Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge in the series, is unsure if he’ll return for the show’s second season. While the Minister of Magic is a rather important supporting character in Harry Potter’s story, the actor says that whether he reprises the role of Fudge in the series for its second season depends on how fans receive the character.

Speaking with the UK outlet The Times last week, Carvel seems to be as in the dark as the fans about the future of Fudge and his involvement in the series. “I don’t know how it’s going to fit into my life,” Carvel confessed. “Whether I come back [after the first series] probably depends on what the fans think. I mean, I’ll be furious if it’s not an amazing part.”

We can assuage his fears there. Fudge serves as Minister of Magic, the head of the wizarding world’s governing body in the United Kingdom for most of Harry’s time at Hogwarts. Fudge is a morally murky and complex political figure obsessed with clinging to power and fostering an ersatz sense of public calm. Spending most of his tenure denying Voldemort’s return, Fudge is forced to confront the truth and step down from his post at the end of the series’s fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, after he sees Voldemort in the flesh during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries.

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Carvel shared that although he previously “would have run a million miles from a project like [Potter]” that offers him the chance to revisit a character several times, he loved the script he read from the new series. “I’ve read the books. I hadn’t before I got the role. I think I saw one of the films, maybe two,” Carvel shared. “As a boy, if I had read these books, I would have devoured them. So I am coming at it with a really open mind.”

Carvel is perfectly suited for the role of Fudge as he has a rich and diverse history of playing larger-than-life political figures. Carvel played U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair on the last two seasons of the historical drama television series The Crown, and he brought U.S. President Donald Trump to the stage in Mike Bartlett’s play The 47th. With a resume that impressive, we’re eager to see what Carvel will bring to Fudge’s grandstanding and machinations in the Harry Potter series. Should he return, he’ll likely have more time to explore the character than his on-screen predecessor, Robert Hardy, who played Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films, as the series is set to devote an entire season to each book rather than a two-and-a-half-hour film.

Carvel and Fudge seem to be a match made in casting heaven; therefore, we don’t think the actor has much to worry about whether he’ll be able to reprise the role as the Harry Potter series unfolds.