All hail the new Harry

HBO has released new images of The Boy Who Lived

We may be coming up to the eighteen-year release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, (July 21, 2007, for the loyal original fans who had once carved that little event into their calendars) but thanks to HBO and Warner Bros, the boy who lived will continue to live on for a while longer yet. As reported by AFP and nearly every other entertainment outlet around the world, production on the multi-series show has kicked off, and the first images of the newest Harry (played by Dominic McLaughlin) in full Hogwarts gear have lit up screens wherever screens are to be found.

A good start

Have HBO and Warner Bros ticked all the boxes? The short answer is: yes. The longer answer is, we won’t really find out until 2027, when the first episode is slated to hit screens at a date no one is quite sure of yet.

However, if, as all Potter fans are wont to do, we crack out a magnifying glass and study this latest Harry’s photo at face value, McLaughlin’s Harry tallies almost perfectly with the vision JK Rowling gave us in her novels. This is a good thing, because this is the Harry who will grow up with the television series for the next ten years. It is not a short commitment. If our upcoming protagonist’s face does not belong to Daniel Radcliffe, it had better tally up with the face we have carried in our heads after committing the books to memory.

McLaughlin’s genetics aside, how much credit we can get away with giving HBO for pulling off this costume achievement remains debatable. Over the course of seven books, Rowling took pains to describe her hero with vivid attention to detail, so for anyone who actually knows how to tick boxes of any description, it is very difficult to go wrong with attempts at recreating him.

For those who are still unaware (although frankly how you have still managed to evade Potter trivia this far into the twenty-first century remains a mystery), Harry’s main story begins at age 11 when he is a vertically challenged young boy. He sports a shock of untidy black hair inherited from his father. He has bright green eyes identical to his mother’s. This is an important plot point that Harry Potter filmmakers treated with short shrift for the film franchise, but we will return to this tragic shortcoming momentarily. Parking eye colour in the corner for a moment, what everybody has managed to get right is the fact that Rowling’s Harry wears round glasses – whatever other shortcomings his aunt and uncle had after reluctantly adopting him, they at least routinely had his eyes tested.

Finally, to complete this atypical vision of our boy wonder, Harry – be it in the books or on screen – also bears a scar on his forehead, bequeathed to him by his nemesis during an ill-advised moment of wildly miscalculated fury. Unimaginative parents around the world have been stuffing their sons into Harry Potter costumes at Halloween for years, scrawling a scar with a red marker on their foreheads for good measure. If burnt-out parents can take on this onerous task, so can the full might of HBO and Warner Bros.

Don’t screw it up

Fortunately, TV producers have managed to avoid dispelling disappointment at this embryonic stage of the filming process. We must cautiously applaud this, because they certainly did avoid disappointment when casting Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape, with Essiedu physically resembling his character as closely as an onion does a carrot. In other words, not even a legally blind patient could confuse one for the other.

But let us get back to less distressing things. As Harry, McLaughlin’s hair looks as though it has been brushed with a balloon, his glasses are satisfyingly round and dark-rimmed, his tie is in Gryffindor colours, and he has the obligatory faint scar after his early liaison with Voldemort. As a special bonus, he also appears to not be suffering the medical condition that led Radcliffe’s eyes to reject green contact lenses and settle for blue instead. Whilst it is no fault of Radcliffe’s what colour contact lenses his eyes chose to find offensive, it is certainly the fault of the filmmakers who appeared to harbour the delusion that nobody would notice if Harry’s mother had brown eyes.

Perhaps this was also the same crew who thought nobody would care if a non-calm Dumbledore turned up in the Goblet of Fire film, or if Ralph Fiennes Voldemort would be seized with a desire to hug one of his Death Eaters. If so, they were dreadfully wrong on both counts. We noticed so much that someone has even chosen to re-enact a Lego version of a not-calm Dumbledore asking Harry if he put his name in the goblet of fire. When you are forced to seek solace in Lego figures to stem the pain of a filmmaker’s blithe ignorance of source material, you know the cut runs deep.

Will this fabulous-on-paper Harry continue to remain faithful to the books? Radcliffe certainly did not, although we cannot fault him for memorising a script he did not write or for following his directors’ orders. The sad truth remains, however, that after leaving the tender loving care of Chris Columbus post-Chamber of Secrets, film Harry was apt to veer off canon with reckless abandon. As loyal book fans are aware, by the time the last two films came around, celluloid Harry found it perfectly acceptable to dance with Hermione in a tent and break a hugely important wand in two, leading to book fans drawing on epic resources of inner restraint to avoid throwing things at the screen, once they had presumably staved off an impending heart attack.

Will McLaughlin’s Harry be forced to carry out similar acts of lunacy? Or will he remain the Harry that book lovers have carried in their heads since 1998? We book fans may be able to forgive a temperamental Dumbledore and an off-brand Snape. But Harry is the core of these stories. Now that HBO Harry looks the part, we are requesting that he henceforth refrains from tiresome tent-dancing, that treats the Elder Wand with the respect it deserves, and that he lands a mother with the correct eye colour. We have many more demands, but this is enough to be cracking on with for now. Thank you for attending this TED talk.