Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling faced blowback online late last year when the cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the Harry Potter sequel stage play, was announced, and it became known that Hermione would be played by Noma Dumezweni—a Black woman. While fan theories that Hermione could have been Black in the books have floated around online for a while, this news took some fans off guard, and Rowling’s not happy at all with how they reacted.
… That’s because they reacted, as Rowling so delicately put it in an interview with The Guardian, like a “bunch of racists” (we do so love her way with words). In the interview’s writeup, The Guardian mentions that Cursed Child director John Tiffany didn’t even know about those fan theories when he made the call to Dumezweni to secure the casting, and he just thought she’d be good in the part. Rowling says she’d seen Dumezweni in a workshop and thought she was a “fabulous” choice and simply the best for the job.
Some of the worse corners of the Internet, however, disagreed, for which Tiffany blames the anonymity provided: “The anonymity breeds horrors so after a while I stopped reading it. But what shocked me was the way people couldn’t visualise a non-white person as the hero of a story. It’s therefore brilliant that this has happened.” Rowling, on the other hand, is a little more web-savvy and already put in her two cents to shut down the dissenters back at the time of the announcement, and she continues to have no patience for haters.
Meanwhile, the play is scheduled to open on July 30, and The Guardian’s interview is slated to be the only one before then, so fans should probably head over and give it a read to glean whatever they can from what little is said by Rowling, Tiffany, and playwright Jack Thorne.
(via THR, image via Pottermore)
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