The ‘Harry Potter' HBO Show Finally Makes A Slam-Dunk Casting Choice
Harry Potter
WB
The Harry Potter HBO series has been all over the place when it comes to casting choices from the decent Dumbledore pick, John Lithgow, to the baffling Snape pick, the too-handsome Paapa Essiedu. Now? It's about to cast an actor who is a slam-dunk for the role he's heading toward.
That would be Nick Frost as the new Hagrid, the famed groundskeeper and key player in especially the early parts of the series. Frost is best-known for his roles in the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg comedies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End. Even though that last one was over a decade ago now, Frost has been in loads of projects since then, including doing a lot of voicework for animated endeavors.
Arriving as Hagrid would be his biggest role possibly ever, given the attention that this controversial, but no doubt widely-watched series will have on Max/HBO when it does arrive. Unlike Lithgow, potentially, if the show runs a decade Frost, currently 52, will not age out of it.
The original actor in the role of Hagrid for all the films was Robbie Coltrane, who sadly passed away in 2022, albeit no doubt he would not have returned, given that this looks to be a 100% new cast. But he did an excellent job and was a beloved part of those films. We'll see if Frost can live up, as perfect as his casting may seem.
The biggest question, of course, is who will play the central trio of Harry, Hermione and Ron, though like the original movies, the goal is to find unknown, young actors for those parts, so it's not going to be anyone you've ever heard of. It's an immense amount of pressure, so hopefully they will be okay, whoever is cast. The other big part yet to be cast will be that of Voldemort, previously played by Ralph Fiennes, who has endorsed Cillian Murphy for the role, albeit there is nothing to indicate that is actually happening, or if he's interested in being locked into that part for the next decade of his career, recent Oscar-winner and all.
I would not expect this show to release before 2027, nor do I expect it to take any less than seven seasons, maybe more, given how long the books get. This is an era where at best, it usually takes 1.5-2 years in between seasons of even not big shows, so this? I don't think it's unreasonable to say we'll be seeing this air into the late 2030s if it doesn't end up cancelled. But I think WB is going to be pot-committed to this one no matter what.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Maher advises Democrats to ‘win' Elon Musk ‘back'
Comedian and media pundit Bill Maher is advising Democrats to 'win' back tech billionaire Elon Musk after the world's richest man fell out publicly with President Trump. Maher slammed some Democratic strategists' proposal that the party needs to have its own version of Joe Rogan. Instead, Maher said, Democrats should ask themselves why they lost 'the old one' since he 'used to be on your side.' 'He's expressed unease with some things Trump is doing, as has a certain disgruntled former employee named Elon Musk, who, like Joe, is another guy who, five years ago, was thought of as a liberal but got driven into the other camp by bad attitudes and bad ideas, a reversal I completely understand, although I would never emulate,' Maher said Friday night on HBO's 'Real Time with Bill Maher.' 'They tried real hard to cancel Rogan a few years ago, and when Elon hosted Saturday Night Live in 2021, well before he was a Trumper, some of the cast members gave him the cold shoulder for the sin of being rich. You think people don't remember when you do this s— to them that it's not going to have blowback,' the comedian said, alluding to Musk's previous support for Democratic candidates, including former Presidents Biden and Obama. 'Now me again. You don't have to win me back, because I never left. But all the guys in America like Joe and Elon, yeah, you do have to win them back. The good news is you can,' he added on Friday night. Maher then pointed to Musk's recent criticism of the administration, including his disappointment with Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.' Trump said Thursday at the White House that he had a 'great' relationship with Musk, but that might not be the case anymore. The tech billionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency adviser then fired back, signaling he is open to forming a third party, backing calls for Trump to be impeached and accusing the president of being listed in the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump warned that he could opt to cut off Musk's companies' contracts with the federal government. 'So I think we call that a gettable voter, someone who's mulling a change,' Maher said of Musk. 'Maybe this will put quietest to the nonsense that Elon and Rogan too went to the dark side.' Ever since suffering heavy losses during the 2024 election cycle, Democrats are looking to rebuild their image, shore up their base and find ways to effectively counter Trump. The party is also looking for its next leader. Democrats have also expressed frustration about efforts to bring men into their coalition who, in November, backed Trump over former Vice President Harris. The GOP did a better of job of speaking to men during the race, particularly younger men, through mediums such as podcasts. 'They kicked our a‑‑es all over the place with these guys,' one top Democratic strategist told The Hill. 'They met male voters exactly where they were and we, on the other hand, had nothing comparable.' At least one House Democrat is open to wooing back Musk, who previously was a Democratic Party donor, into the party's tent. 'If Biden had a big supporter criticize him, Trump would have hugged him the next day. When we refused to meet with @RobertKennedyJr, Trump embraced him & won. We can be the party of sanctimonious lectures, or the party of FDR that knows how to win & build a progressive majority,' Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in a Thursday post on social media platform X. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Cosmopolitan
4 hours ago
- Cosmopolitan
‘Ginny & Georgia' Season 3 on Netflix Tackles Painful Periods
New episodes of Ginny & Georgia season 3 went online on Thursday and there is practically no adolescent issue that this mother-daughter dramedy hasn't covered. Losing your virginity? Check. Getting into a huge fight with your bestie? Yep. Getting drunk at a house party? Got that covered. Learning that your mom killed your stepdad? Also check. Okay, maybe that last one isn't so typical, but you get the idea. So it's no surprise that in season 3 of Ginny & Georgia, the Netflix hit is tackling that infamous coming-of-age milestone: periods. For the past two seasons, fans have watched high school sophomore Ginny and her core group of girlfriends, Max, Abby, and Norah try to survive Wellsbury High. In classic teen show fashion, every character has their own issues. Max is a girl-crazy drama queen (literally, she's an actor), Abby is struggling with body dysmorphia and bulimia, and now, in season 3, Norah's got period problems. Throughout the newest season, Norah is either on her period, waiting for it, or complaining about it. 'My period is so irregular, I can't even predict when it's going to happen,' she says in episode 6, right before getting all of her friends to take pregnancy tests with her. The very next episode, her pregnancy scare is forgotten, but her mysterious period ailments continue. 'My mom took me to the gyno, which was pointless because they just ask me a hundred different questions. And you don't know your family history when you're adopted.' (Yep, the show also has an adoption subplot.) The doctors ran tests, Norah explained, but still can't figure out what's going on. Well, I have a pretty good guess. I first got my period when I was 11, and for five years, when doctors asked me if my periods were heavy or irregular, I shrugged and said, 'No.' I didn't know any better. What I didn't tell my pediatrician was that I was bleeding through super tampons and maxi pads, staining my pajamas and sheets, and downing Advil to deal with my period cramps. Despite having two sisters and a whole gaggle of girlfriends, I truly thought that my period was normal because I had learned to live with it. I never thought to compare notes. Then one morning during a particularly heavy period, I took a step out of bed and a blood clot flew out of my underwear and onto the carpet. I had bled through the super plus tampon I was wearing and my overnight maxi pad. The next time my doctor asked me if my periods were heavy, I finally said, 'Yes.' Unlike Norah, I was overweight, so my doctor already suspected I had a hormonal issue and sent me to an endocrinologist straight away. A few doctors appointments and 8 to 10 vials worth of blood tests later, I was diagnosed with PCOS—Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. It's a hormone disorder believed to be hereditary that can cause, among other things, excess facial hair, heavy or irregular menstrual cycles, weight gain, and ovarian cysts. Some women don't have a lot of symptoms; others have all of the above. At the time, the criteria for PCOS was extremely vague, and the possible treatments were basically nonexistent. (In case you need a reminder: Women's health is underfunded, under-researched, and undervalued.) Effective medical treatments for PCOS are hard to come by. When I asked about next steps, my doctor shrugged their shoulders, gave me a prescription for birth control, and told me to lose weight (which, oh, by the way, is harder to do when you have PCOS). Over 15 years later, it seems not much has changed. At the end of the season, Norah's period mystery remains unsolved. She doesn't know why her periods are irregular or why she has bad cramps. And after years of just dealing with it, she seems resigned to just barreling through. I feel her pain. While I assume that she'll get a hard-fought diagnosis of either PCOS or endometriosis in season 4, it's also possible that she'll never get the answers she's looking for. Ask any woman with PCOS or endometriosis and they'll tell you it took years for them to even go to a doctor to discuss period pain, let alone be diagnosed. And that's partly due to the fact that many women just don't know that these conditions exist. In modern America, period pain is often dismissed, and uterus-related conversations are still taboo. Even in teen shows like Gilmore Girls or Gossip Girl, characters don't acknowledge their periods until there's a pregnancy scare plot. Young women like Norah might not learn about PCOS or endometriosis from their friends or their mothers or even their doctors—so I'm hoping that at least for some teens and tweens, Norah's storyline on Ginny & Georgia can fill in the gaps. And if a hormone disorder is the cause of her period problems, I hope she gets diagnosed faster than I did.
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Forbes
What The Streaming Wars Reveal about Bad Strategy
Rooftop party and viewing in Los Angeles. Created By Michelle Loret de Mola using Midjourney Max just pulled a classic Hollywood move: the reboot. Two years after Warner Bros. Discovery stripped away the iconic 'HBO' from its name, they've decided to bring it back. Max will now be called HBO Max…again. This will be the streaming service's fifth name change. They were HBO Go in 2008, then HBO Now in 2015, then HBO Max in 2020, then just Max in 2023, and now (hopefully, finally) back to HBO Max. On the face of it, this just seems like bad brand management. But there's a bigger lesson to be learned here. These changes were more than just rebrands: each new name came along with a fundamentally different business strategy. HBO succeeded when it relied on its own creativity. And then stumbled when it tried to copy competitors. For decades, HBO had a unique playbook. It focused on a combination of recently released movies, exclusive live events, and original series. While broadcast television depended on advertising, HBO used a subscription model. HBO played a leading role in what has been called 'television's second golden age.' It greenlit shows that shaped the culture, like The Sopranos, Sex and The City, The Wire, and Game of Thrones. At its core, HBO's playbook was all about the curation and production of prestige content. Of course, that was before the consultants came in. In June 2018, Time Warner, HBO's parent company, was acquired by AT&T for $85 billion. Shortly after completing the acquisition, John Stankey, the new CEO of WarnerMedia decided to change the playbook. To Stankey, HBO's tightly curated, time and resource-intensive model didn't seem scalable. He wanted a broader, more mass market platform with more content, more engagement, and more subscriber growth. In a town hall to HBO employees, Stankey emphasized, "We need hours a day. It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes. I want more hours of engagement." Stankey believed substantially more content would increase viewer engagement, and that would provide more data, in turn enabling monetization through advertising and subscriptions. In short, HBO's new strategy would be to stop being HBO and start trying to be Netflix. And who wouldn't want to be Netflix? Netflix was the company that slayed Blockbuster, reinvented TV distribution, disrupted Hollywood, and rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a media company. Today, Netflix enjoys a half trillion dollar market cap that is double that of Disney and 22 times that of Warner Bros. Discovery. There was just one problem with that playbook: HBO isn't Netflix. What followed was seven years of wandering in the wilderness, as HBO struggled to emulate the Netflix model. Frustrated with the new strategy, HBO CEO Richard Plepler walked away in 2019. HBO's original content was folded into Warner Bros.' extensive library of content and relaunched as HBO Max. And while global subscriptions for HBO Max reached 69.4 million by October 2021, much of that growth came because we were all locked up at home during a pandemic. Unable to drive further growth from its acquisition, AT&T spun off WarnerMedia to create Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022. And things got even worse. Warner CEO David Zaslav doubled down on the Netflix playbook by dropping the HBO name altogether and flooding the platform with content from Discovery and Food Network. Suddenly, the platform that brought you The Wire was pumping out shows like Dr. Pimple Popper and My 600-lb Life. The end result of this copycat strategy was external confusion, internal demoralization, and financial underperformance. In recent months, Warner Bros. Discovery execs have begun to concede that they simply can't compete head-to-head with Netflix. As JB Perrette, the president of streaming, said in an interview, 'We started listening to consumers saying, 'Hey, we don't really want more content, we want something that is different, we want to end the death scroll with something that is better.'' It turns out no one wants a second-rate Netflix when they can already subscribe to the real thing. They want an alternative. They want HBO. Over the past year, Max has regained momentum by focusing more on quality, adult shows like The White Lotus and The Pitt instead of trying to provide a firehose of entertainment for everyone. The return to being called HBO Max is a long-overdue recognition that this is where its future lies. WarnerMedia made the same mistake with other properties, too. The company hired McKinsey to develop a growth playbook for CNN. Trying to emulate Disney+, they decided to launch CNN+. But guess what? Anderson Cooper isn't Iron Man. Wolf Blitzer isn't Obi Wan Kenobi. The service was dead in a month. According to Nielsen, Warner Bros. Discovery drew 1.5% of viewing time in March. This was less than Disney, Amazon, Paramount, Roku, and Tubi. Netflix dominated, with 8% of total viewership. The lessons from the streaming world apply to every industry: the minute you stop asking what makes you special and start copying others, you've already lost. You have to be creative. You have to come up with your own playbook for growth. It's a mistake to think you can succeed by copying the strategies of successful competitors. Trying to win by benchmarking high-performing peers feels safe. It has persuasive appeal when presented in a PowerPoint deck. A huge industry of consultants has grown up around it, adding to the illusion of safety. And it's an easy way to win short-term praise from the business press and investors. In reality, though, benchmarking is a fast track to mediocrity. Copying others only tells you what worked yesterday for someone else, when what leaders need to focus on is what will work for them tomorrow. Great companies aren't built on copycat playbooks — they succeed by doing something original based on their unique strengths. Even while others were trying to copy it, Netflix stayed true to its own unique playbook based on global content, viewer data, and rapid iteration. When the company took out $2 billion in debt in 2018 to help finance a surge in original content, skeptics questioned whether its strategy was sustainable. But it wasn't a gamble — it was an investment based on data. Unlike traditional studios, Netflix knew exactly what its viewers were watching, where, for how long, and when they dropped off. It used those insights to launch hit shows like Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Stranger Things. Netflix also localized content early, producing Korean hits for South Korea and Indian dramas for South Asia and the Middle East. By the end of 2024, the skeptics had been silenced — Netflix's subscriber numbers topped 300 million, more than double the total at the end of 2018. Netflix operates on the premise that it will win by doing things its own way. For its part, Disney could have fallen into the trap of trying to chase Netflix when it launched its Disney+ streaming service in 2019. But rather than flooding the zone with content, Disney realized that its winning playbook depended on developing content around signature franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar. These worlds are ultimately more than content — they're emotional ecosystems. And Disney knows how to turn emotions into revenue streams — through a flywheel of fan engagement, merchandise, theatrical releases, and theme park rides. For that reason, Disney doesn't define success solely through streaming metrics. It also pays close attention to loyalty, lifetime customer value, park attendance, and toy sales. Netflix and Disney+ succeeded by developing their own unique playbooks. HBO lost its way by trying to be something it wasn't. Influenced by consultants and consensus thinking, it was led into the sea of sameness, where companies go to die…or at least spend years treading water. To be sure, that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch and learn from competitors. But there's a big difference between stealing a page from someone else and trying to copy their whole playbook. The risk of doing that is threefold. First, it means you're playing to someone else's strengths, not your own. Second, it means you're focusing on what worked yesterday, not tomorrow. And third, you end up the same as everyone else, and sink into mediocrity. So if benchmarking isn't the answer, what is? The path to success lies in writing your own playbook, starting by answering five fundamental questions that define who you are and your vision for the future. HBO's latest reboot has been greeted with its fair share of sniggers and eye-rolls. But it shows that the company is waking up to what made it great in the first place. That's a good thing, giving it a shot at renewed success. The path forward for HBO isn't about going bigger or trying to please everyone. It's about going bolder, with fewer, better stories that shape the culture. In the end, the companies that come out on top aren't the ones chasing the crowd. They're the ones bold enough to say: This is who we are. This is what we believe. And this is how we win. No benchmarking required.
