Cursed Child’s Golden Trio Talk The Joy of Being Wizards

The actors playing the “Golden Trio” of Harry, Hermione and Ron in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child talk the joy of playing wizards in the best job ever.

More from Culturess

• 8 Hanukkah books to help you celebrate the festival of lights
• Could Taylor Swift top the 2024 Fandoms of the Year list, too?
• Oppenheimer producer wanted Barbie release date moved
• Marvel’s Spidey and his Amazing Friends gets Season 3 premiere date
• Billie Eilish speaks out after she claims ‘Variety’ outed her at a red carpet event

We are just over a week out from the opening night of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. For those who have avoided spoilers under the #KeepTheSecrets campaign, though, there’s not much they know about the show, except for the three actors who play the older version of the franchise’s original Golden Trio of Harry, Hermione and Ron: Jamie Parker, Noma Dumezweni and Paul Thornley. Now they’re speaking out on how great it is to star in the show.

Fans weren’t the only one for whom things were kept under wraps. The production did a lot of work to keep the actors from seeing the kind of mania that was occurring around the show, including having them rehearse far from the theater, far away in an aircraft hangar, out by Bromley-by-Bow. So when they did finally arrive at the Palace Theater for the first preview, the shock of seeing the mobs of cosplaying fans was enormous.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Thornley was jazzed by it: “It was absolute craziness, people were so pumped up.” Dumezweni’s shock came out as understatement: “This is quite big.”

For Thornley, like, many of the older generation of actors who were in the original Harry Potter series, getting cast as Ron meant that finally he had a job his kids approved of. “My children finally think I’m doing something worthwhile. That’s glorious. I could be playing Hamlet at the RSC and they wouldn’t give a monkey’s, but Ron Weasley… it’s got currency in the playground. Suddenly I’m worth talking to.”

All three of the actors have children, and for Dumezweni’s daughter, this was equally huge. Apparently she was so concerned about Keeping the Secrets she asked “Can I tell them it’s in two parts?”

But for all of them, the difference is just in their lives, but when they’re on stage. After all, acting in theater is fundamentally different than in movies, where it’s takes done with no audience but the director and other actors. On stage it’s giving the full performance to paying customers from start to finish over and over, and sometimes twice a day. In the words of Parker, having an audience who has already bought into the world before they even arrive at the theater is a huge weight off the shoulders of the actors, who are usually burdened with introducing said world to a roomful of people who will only even enter that world the one time.

"“That benign attention and pressure has been the wind at our backs,” he says. “The audience [mostly aged 25 to 35] have encouraged us and willed us to succeed the whole way. Generally in the theatre you spend some portion of the performance convincing people they have done the right thing in buying the ticket; that this is the play they want to watch. Never in our lives have we been able to hit the ground at full sprint like this.”"

They also praise the actors who carry the next generation, Sam Clemmett who plays Albus Potter and Anthony Boyle who plays Scorpius Malfoy the son of Harry’s one time nemesis, Draco.

"“There is no way I could have done what those two are doing at their age,” says Thornley. “They are on stage on their own for long periods. They are carrying it.” Boyle and Clemmett, both 22, are known affectionately as Ant and Dec. Or, as Dumezweni predicts, “the Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris of the next generation.”"

As to whether the show will change their lives the way it did for Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint nearly twenty years ago, none seem to want to contemplate that.

"“We’re still turning up for the train. Ask me in a year’s time,” says Dumezweni."

Thornley admits it’s “nice” to be in a show they know won’t close within two weeks of opening, but will last the entire scheduled ten month run through May of 2017, and could quite possibly then continue with a series of extensions, if not move to New York and Broadway.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opens on July 30th at the Palace Theater. The script of the show will arrive in bookstores at 12midnight later that same evening.