‘Serious security’ on “Harry Potter” set after death threats made against cast member
HBO is not taking any chances on the set of its Harry Potter adaptation.
On the heels of Ghanian-English actor Paapa Essiedu revealing he’s received death threats since being cast as Severus Snape, network CEO Casey Bloys has acknowledged the precautions taken to protect the stars of the upcoming series.
Paapa Essiedu will reprise the role of Snape, made famous by Alan Rickman in the films
Credit: Dave Benett/Getty; Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection
“With all actors on any kind of big IP shows — and this is obviously one of those where you’ve got, you know, passionate fans, people with a lot of opinions — it can get scary in places,” Bloys acknowledged to Variety.
“So for any show like that, we anticipated it and tried to have training, you know, best practices in terms of social media and how to handle it,” he continued. “And obviously we’ve got a serious security team. So unfortunately, it was something that we thought might happen and we just try to be as careful as we can.”
Essiedu, who portrays the Potions professor at Hogwarts School, revealed days ago that online trolls have been spamming him with disturbing hate messages. “I’ve been told, ‘Quit, or I’ll murder you,'” Essiedu told The Times on Saturday.
“The reality is that if I look at Instagram I will see somebody saying, ‘I’m going to come to your house and kill you,'” he continued. “While I hope I’ll be okay, nobody should have to encounter this for doing their job.”
Also on Tuesday, HBO dropped the first look at its highly-anticipated Harry Potter series.
In the image — which quickly racked up nearly 1 million likes on Instagram — fans get a sneak peek at both Harry (Dominic McLaughlin) and his beloved Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as the boy walks towards the quidditch pitch draped in a red-and-gold cloak representing Gryffindor.
Set for a 2027 release, Harry Potter is still in production, but Bloys is “thrilled with what I’ve seen” so far.
“And what’s nice is the books have obviously remained popular, but you now have parents who grew up on it and wanting to share that with [their] kids, and kids on their own wanting it so just from a from a business point of view, that’s a big opportunity,” added the HBO boss. “From a creative point of view… One of the benefits of it, from my point of view, is spending more time with characters and story. And so if you’ve got a book, let alone a series of books, to kind of arbitrarily say, ‘Well, we’ve got two hours’ you have to make some difficult decisions. So the idea is to have the freedom to let it breathe a little bit more and explore the world a bit more.”
Harry Potter also stars John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley.
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