When Entertainment Weekly talked to director Chris Columbus about the casting decisions for the original movie, he revealed that the casting choices weren’t too difficult. “When Rupert walked into the room, we all thought, ‘Well, there’s Ron,’” Columbus said. “He just had that Weasley quality. And Emma was just this precocious, bright 10-year-old. She was Hermione. Did we have the vision and foresight to know they would develop into these incredible actors and stars? No. That’s just pure dumb luck.”
Fast forward to 2024: If you or your kid want to be one of the next Harry Potter characters, you’d better work quickly. According to the casting call, auditions will end on Halloween 2024. The new cast members must be between 9 to 11 years old. They have to live in either Ireland or the United Kingdom: Sorry, U.S.-based Harry Potter fans! The child actors will have to submit two different videos, as well as a reading of a brief poem or monologue. The casting directions insist that kids must use their own accents. (Imagine how many Harry Potter accent imitations they’ll still get, despite those directions!) The kids have just one minute in total to convince the casting crew that they should be the next Harry, Ron, or Hermione. The pressure’s on!
To expect any 9 or 11-year-old to understand what it meant to be one of the original Harry Potter cast members is an impossible task: They simply weren’t alive for the incredible hype over it. People waited in line for hours to buy the newest Harry Potter books. Folks dressed up in costume to attend sold-out movie screenings. The movies combined raked in billions of dollars in revenue. The hype just can’t be recreated, no matter how talented these children are, no matter how well their media training goes, or how much press they do. They’re growing up in the social media era, and it’s a whole new world out there.
Today’s kids spend lots of time on apps like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, in that order. The Pew Research Center found that 67% of teens use TikTok, and an incredible 95% of these kids use YouTube. Over a third of teens use social media “almost constantly.”
What would it have been like if Daniel Radcliffe, at age 12, was a TikToker, making short-form videos from on set? Can we imagine a world where a young Rupert Grint would’ve been a streamer on YouTube, or Emma Watson was doing “get ready with me” live streams? Does it water down the concept of a bona fide celebrity when they’re posting to their socials a dozen times per day, allowing anyone with a cell phone to see what they’re up to? Or has the nature of celebritydom just changed with the times?
Gen Z entertainer/Dance Moms child star/musician JoJo Siwa is a great example of what fame can look like in the year 2024. The 21-year-old shares that she often posts hundreds of photos and videos to her Snapchat channel every day. Yes, that’s right: She posts hundreds of moments of her day, every single day, lamenting that she shares almost everything with her audience. And that, she said, means that people are constantly picking her apart. It’s left her “addicted to numbers.” It’s hard not to get a dopamine rush over the feeling of watching a YouTube video pull in thousands of views and gain a steady stream of new followers. (Alongside her 1.3 million Snapchat subscribers, she has 11.1 million followers on Instagram and 45.8 million on TikTok.) Not to mention that Siwa has historically made hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on social media. She admits that her usage of social media is extreme. “It’s so much work and my whole day is filmed,” she told People. “Everything I eat is filmed, every song I sing in the car is filmed.” Recording and broadcasting her every movement leaves her with “nothing left for me at the end of the day.”
Image via @itsjojosiwa
Of course, the original Harry Potter actors spent a lot of time in the spotlight, too, and they certainly had millions of eyes on them. Being a world-famous actor comes with some drawbacks: For example, Ron Weasley actor Rupert Grint has discussed the atypical upbringing that comes along with being a working child actor. The star was surrounded by adults while working each day on a film set, instead of going to a regular school surrounded by kids his own age. The world literally watched him grow up. He felt a “real detachment from my peers” when he did go to school to take exams, adding that he just didn’t have much in common with children outside the film set. He found the paparazzi and the inescapable media attention to be “particularly frightening.” There were fans everywhere, and he couldn’t know for certain who was his friend and who was just trying to be around a famous actor. He even maintains that he cannot remember his life before Harry Potter (although he admits he did get accustomed to this lifestyle over time).
It’ll be no short acting stint for the next set of Harry Potter kids, either. The project is slated to run for “ten consecutive years,” although there are only seven Harry Potter books and eight movies, leaving fans wondering how the new adaptation will structure the seasons.
Although the previous stars are keeping their distance from the project, Daniel Radcliffe has some good advice for the future Harry Potter stars. When asked, he said, “Just like, let them be kids still. I can't imagine what it would have been like to do that in the age of social media. We were kind of a little bit before that.
Sure enough, the social media discussion, praise, and backlash against many aspects of the project are already beginning. Some X users were uneasy with a new trio of actors taking the reins, while others mentioned missing other actors from the original who have passed away or chosen not to star in the new adaptation.
Image via @JennMGreenberg
Image via @JamesWr94127963
In the end, we’ll have to wait and see who the casting directors choose to be the new Harry, Ron, and Hermione (not to mention all the other Hogwarts students and teachers). Until then, people keep deferring to the OG Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe. He gave his even-handed opinion, saying, “My understanding is that they’re trying to very much start fresh and I’m sure whoever is making them will want to make their own mark on it and probably not want to have to figure out how to get old Harry to cameo in this somewhere. So I’m definitely not seeking it out in any way. But I do wish them, obviously, all the luck in the world.” Much like young Hogwarts students putting on the “Sorting Hat” for the first time in front of the whole school, the world will have its eyes on these young actors. Let’s hope they’re ready for all the attention it will bring.
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