Fans Calling For Marauders Prequel

Potterheads debate the pros and cons of casting Adam Driver as a young Severus Snape in a hypothetical Marauders’ Era prequel.

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Since the announcement of two new Harry Potter tales to be told this year—Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—interest in other avenues of the Potterverse has been piqued. We’re all familiar with the end of Harry’s story, but the extension of the Wizarding world that we’ll see when Fantastic Beasts hits theaters in November opens up dozens of new doors. If we’re soon to learn the history of Newt Scamander, the author of one of Harry’s textbooks, who knows what other connections to Harry we’ll see more of in the future?

Despite the myriad of possibilities, there is one area in particular that fans keep coming back to. Thanks to the series’ epilogue, we all knew there was a “Nineteen Years Later,” but what about “Nineteen Years Earlier”? Nearly two decades prior to Harry’s birth, his parents were in their early years at Hogwarts, and Potterheads have been throwing questions about the class of ‘78 and the First Wizarding War since the beginning of the series. Recently, we examined some of those questions, but as of yet we still have no answers; and there doesn’t seem to be any indication of them in the near future, either.

But lack of canonical information hasn’t stopped fans from speculating, and that speculation includes which actors would be best suited to the Marauders’ Era roles. The most recent talk of the town? Adam Driver for the school-age Severus Snape.

Personally, I’m not sold on the idea, although it’s something I could probably come around to if Driver quit washing and styling his hair for a week or so. It seems, however, that Potterheads are so keen on Driver because of his role as antagonist Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as Radio Times hypothesizes: “It might have something to do with Kylo Ren’s Snape-like sartorial choices. Then again, it could be the fact that he too was a good guy who has turned bad but is struggling to completely commit.”

Okay, you had me at Kylo Ren, but lost me in the classification of both he and Snape as “good guys.” I’d like to counter that Adam Driver would make a good Snape because, after his stint as Kylo Ren, we already know that Driver can nail that whole “oh-woe-is-me-only-the-dark-side-understands-my-deep-adolescent-turmoil” bit. (That’s mostly a joke, but there’s still a hint of truth to it.)

Moreover, Snape never “struggled” to be a bad guy—he was a bad guy. He was a Death Eater, fully committed to Voldemort and his mission to unleash torture, violence, and ultimately genocide unto the Muggle population. The tattoo on his forearm is evidence enough that he did indeed “completely commit” to his evil, no matter what he would do later in his life (and even those actions are still a hot-button debate among fans). It’s this sort of interpretation of the character that makes me hope and pray that we never get a Marauders’ prequel at all; much as I’d like some of those details, I can’t sit through another film adaptation that paints Snape as some misunderstood force of benevolence when he’s canonically a wizard Nazi. Whatever your opinion on Snape’s hero/villain status at the end of the series, point of fact is that he was a villain at an integral moment in Harry’s timeline, and that shouldn’t be bypassed, sugarcoated, or blatantly ignored as often as it is.

Moving on.

The biggest point of contention regarding this hypothetical casting call is Driver’s age, which, at 32, places him in the range of Snape’s age during the Harry Potter series, and therefore he would be too old to portray a teenaged Snape. Of course, age hardly factored into the casting for the films, as the actors who portray Lily, James, Remus, Sirius, and Snape were all in their 40s-50s, when in actuality those characters would have been in their 30s (with the exception of the Potters, who were 21 at the time of their deaths).

But Harry Potter isn’t the only onscreen series that doesn’t factor in the age of actors compared to their characters (which is why teenagers on TV always look more like twenty-somethings—because they are twenty-somethings), so it’s perfectly plausible that should a Marauders’ Era prequel come to the big screen, Driver could very well be a contender for the role of Severus Snape.

Next: New Promotional Photos for Cursed Child

If we continue to get radio silence on the subject, however, these casting debates will never come to any sort of fruition. There has been no indication that J.K. Rowling will ever give fans a direct prequel to Harry’s story, but in the event that she does… Just saying, my vote is for Sophie Turner as Lily Evans and Bob Morley as James Potter. Snape, meanwhile, isn’t much of my concern, although I must admit that Driver’s performance as Kylo Ren is pretty solid evidence that he could pull off that particular creep factor.

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