HBO Harry Potter Series Close To Casting Paapa Essiedu And Janet McTeer As Snape And McGonagall

Wands at the ready Potterheads — here's a bit of Friday evening news that's sure to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses. Following hot on the heels of John Lithgow's casting as Professor Albus Dumbledore in HBO's upcoming Harry Potter TV series, it looks like the network giant may have just found two more acting heavyweights prepared to board the Hogwarts Express and take up post at fiction's most famous school of witchcraft and wizardry. According to Deadline, Oscar nominee and KAOS star Janet McTeer is in talks to play Professor Minerva McGonagall in HBO's ambitious new show, while The Lazarus Project's Paapa Essiedu — long rumoured to be on the Wizarding World casting wishlist — is reportedly close to closing a deal to play Potions Master and actual Half-Blood Prince Professor Severus Snape.

Originally portrayed by the late, great Dame Maggie Smith and the also sorely missed Alan Rickman respectively, McGonagall and Snape are two of the major anchor roles in the Potter series, and the actors playing them in writer-showrunner Francesca Gardiner and director/executive producer Mark Mylod's small screen reboot will be expecting to spend the next decade in these roles. As such, the casting of 34-year-old Essiedu as a more book accurately aged Snape compared to Rickman, who was 54 when he first donned the black robe, and of 63-year-old McTeer — four years younger than Smith was when she began — as McGonagall makes a lot of sense. And while a certain, unsavoury corner of the internet will doubtless lose their minds at the notion of a non-white actor playing a fictitious wizard in a family-orientated fantasy series (J.K. Rowling's book description of Snape as 'sallow-skinned' does, for the record, not mean 'white'), multiple time BAFTA nominated Essiedu has shown across his body of work — from Gangs Of London to The Lazarus Project to I May Destroy You — an aptitude for playing darkly charismatic, complex figures that not only aligns him well with the role he is being eyed for, but also the acting titan he'll be inheriting it from.

With Lithgow, Essiedu, and McTeer all now signed up or at least seemingly reaching for pens to dot 'i's and cross 't's, and HBO's casting division well underway whittling down the astonishing 32,000 audition tapes to find their Harry, Ron, and Hermione, the next phase of the on-screen Wizarding World — which will be shot on the same Leavesden sets as Warner Bros.' OG films — is starting to gain real momentum. Expect more casting announcements to start pouring through in the weeks and months to come as we ready our return to Hogwarts in late 2026/early 2027. Wizard!