The Trying star arrives for Season 2 alongside two Chamber of Secrets regulars, as filming resumes at Leavesden with a cast that already outnumbers most soap operas.
HBO's Harry Potter reboot has found its Weasley patriarch, and he comes with a family connection nobody at the studio needed to manufacture. Rafe Spall will play Arthur Weasley in Season 2, the network confirmed on Tuesday, joining Moaning Myrtle (Molly Hewitt-Richards) and Colin Creevey (Jasper Ambrose) as the latest names bolted onto a cast list that keeps growing before the first season has even aired.
Spall, best known here for Apple TV's Trying and for turns in Life of Pi and The Big Short, steps into a role Mark Williams played across the original film franchise. There's a neat bit of trivia buried in the casting. His father, Timothy Spall, played Peter Pettigrew, aka Wormtail, in five of those films. Two Spalls, two very different corners of the wizarding world, one now working for HBO instead of Warner Bros.' film division.
Hewitt-Richards, seen in BritBox's Code of Silence and BBC's Casualty, takes over the ghost who haunts the second-floor girls' bathroom, a part Shirley Henderson made memorably shrill on screen. Ambrose, from The Sheep Detectives, plays Creevey, the camera-toting Harry superfan who barely survived past his introduction in the films. Both characters matter a lot more to Chamber of Secrets, the book Season 2 is adapting, than they ever got to on screen the first time round.
They're not the only new faces. Bonnie Hill and Lenny Rush were named earlier this month as Ginny Weasley and Dobby, and Billy Barratt is on board as Tom Riddle. Kit Harington signed on in August as Gilderoy Lockhart, after Nicholas Hoult dropped out over scheduling conflicts, according to Deadline. Worth noting, Ginny herself is also a recast. Gracie Cochrane played the character in Season 1. Hill takes over from here.
All this while the show hasn't premiered a single episode. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone lands on HBO on December 25, with Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton and Alastair Stout as the trio, and a professor roster that includes John Lithgow's Dumbledore, Janet McTeer's McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu's Snape and Nick Frost's Hagrid. Season 2 is already shooting at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, per Deadline, with the show having secured an early renewal months before its Christmas debut.
That's an unusual amount of confidence for a series nobody outside a test screening has actually watched. HBO clearly isn't hedging on a franchise this size, and the studio seems intent on keeping the casting drip going scene by scene rather than one big reveal. Francesca Gardiner writes and executive produces, with Mark Mylod directing multiple episodes.
The real test starts December 25. Until then, expect more names to trickle out of Leavesden as the Chamber of Secrets ensemble fills in around Harington's Lockhart.
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