Finding Harry: The Craft Behind the Magic

Some stories change us.

Please travel in the front

six coaches only.

Some stories define us.

But few stories live with us.

And, action!

Quite like the boy who lived.

Soon to be told by HBO Max...

...like never before.

Harry's story from J.K. Rowling's beloved book series

is a truly immersive tale...

requiring incredible dedication

to realize this mesmerizing,

almost limitless magical world.

To create a place so rich, complex,

and expansive,

building it in our world would be impossible...

until the true wizards get to work.

The Harry Potter stories

are-- are this extraordinary phenomenon

from 30 years ago,

for young people.

But it struck a chord with people of all ages.

And to reimagine the Harry Potter canon...

to let it breathe,

to tell a story in eight episodes

rather than a single two-hour movie,

to go down all the wonderful rabbit holes.

The story is there,

but we get to enact all the things

that you know are going on in the wings,

but you don't see them.

You wait forever to do something

that-- that means that much to people.

And I think-- I think this really will.

And they have done a brilliant job

of selecting this extraordinary ensemble.

We stopped counting at 40,000.

Yeah. It wasn't a good use of our time at that point

to count, but we watched all of them.

Yeah. We're looking for a child

who he-- he means so much to people in different ways.

And so, you are looking for a kid

who perhaps on the face of it seems quite ordinary,

but is ultimately very extraordinary.

We wanted to make sure that all kids in the UK

could audition by submitting their first auditions online.

And then we went to Manchester, Scotland, Ireland, and...

- Cardiff. - Cardiff, Wales.

When we were auditioning children,

we knew it was gonna be a long process.

We started with Harry, Ron, and Hermione,

and they are really good friends.

And so, it was a really exciting challenge

to find three kids

that you would believe as friends

with these very strong, different personalities.

These are all ordinary kids, you know?

But they are all extraordinary.

There's magic in all of them.

We saw Alastair in Manchester,

and he was just funny and charming

from the word "go." Yeah.

This is him doing his, um...

- His story. Poem. - ...his little story.

Mother doesn't want a dog.

She's making a mistake. 'Cause more than a dog,

I think she will not want this snake.

That was first day of Alastair.

And then, Arabella in London.

"Hermione, lack of filter from being an only child.

"Her superpower is her emotional intelligence.

She's got main-character energy."

So, this is Arabella's first audition.

- Yeah. - So, she did the poem Invictus.

It matters not how strait the gate,

how charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

Hermione has to be playful,

so we got her in to do a scene

where she's talking to her parents

about, um, Harry and Ron.

And she was-- got-- got the giggles

and did little snorts, and that's the take we used

to show them that she's playful.

So, you're constantly using bits of the audition

that you know is gonna help the kid

when you show it to the director and the showrunner.

So, Arabella's snort was quite crucial

- in her casting process. - Yeah.

We met Dominic in Glasgow.

What did we have about Harry?

"He's skeptical of the adult world.

He's got a vulnerability and a melancholy."

- And-- - And a solitary--

- a solitary quality to him. - A solitary quality.

- He's grown up alone. - He's grown up alone,

and he-- he's-- survival is his thing.

Artful Dodger, not Oliver Twist.

It's basically, find an incredible actor,

- age ten. - Basically, yeah.

- That was the brief. - Yeah, yeah.

He has so many different qualities.

So many different qualities.

Dominic came in and his piece was a poem

about his weekend that he'd written himself,

and it was rhyming.

And we thought, "He's so interesting."

"My Weekend" by Dominic.

So, started off Saturday morning,

I had a football game to play,

and I can tell you, it went my way.

Didn't really have anything to do after that,

so I just slept the rest of the day.

Dom just had this sort of quiet confidence in himself.

- Who do you live with? - Hey, I live with my mum,

my dad, and my two sisters.

- Okay. - And my dog.

And have you done any acting before?

Um, I did Macbeth in January.

And were you one of Macduff's sons?

Yeah, I was.

Oh, you got killed, unfortunately.

- Yeah. - Sorry to hear that.

Okay. That's great.

I really feel confident in these kids.

I think they're incredible.

In a show of this scale, it's easy to get lost.

You can go to the Great Hall, it's huge.

You can go to the Quidditch pitch, it's massive.

You can go to, uh, Diagon Alley.

And we go back to the sets and we're revisiting them,

adding a bit of detail.

Sometimes, for example,

I'll go to the Gryffindor common room

or to the tower,

and you're in there on your own,

and you're looking around and you look at the noticeboard

and you're looking at every little bit of detail

on McGonagall's desk, of the, uh, books,

on the spines, and you-- it's goosebumps.

The volume of this is just so fun...

to be able to build at a scale like this.

It's just a designer's dream

to play in a sandbox that's this big.

We're trying to get in the joy and the playfulness

of what it means to be a magical kid.

When the first Harry Potter book came out,

it really felt so novel and exciting.

I think everyone had that shared experience

of thinking what an incredible world,

it would be so great to touch.

And so, we're trying to capture those moments of discovery

that you find within the books.

We want you to have that same experience here.

But we are adding a level of world-building

that is even beyond what the audience is familiar with.

Harry's introduction

to the physical space of the wizarding world

starts with the Leaky Cauldron.

And eventually, we come out the back

and go into our Diagon Alley set.

The elements that we see

are all things that we would recognize,

but how they combine and form

is gonna be something really new and exciting.

Privet Drive in our Muggle world,

we really wanted to be rooted in reality.

And part of that, I think, for someone as a fan

and an audience member, is when your Muggle world

is rooted in a reality that we're all familiar with,

it makes the excitement of the wizarding world

just being beyond our reach all the more enticing.

There's really a ton of thought that's going into this,

so that for the die-hard fans, we're trying to land it.

We've created these spaces

that I think are gonna give everybody a lot of joy

to kind of be in and experience.

It's just so exciting that everybody is so game

to make these things come alive.

Walking into the Great Hall that first time, where you go,

"It's like walking into a cathedral."

It was so magical.

It's so huge. It's so beautiful.

And the entrance of the children coming in,

the first-years coming in,

and then bringing them into that hall,

was possibly my favorite set in that sense.

It was just so iconic

and so, kind of, uh, symbolic of,

"Right, here we go.

"Whole new bunch of kids, into this world we go.

"And here we are in Hogwarts, and welcome,

and a whole new mystery is unfolding for you."

And sometimes, you're in your dressing room

and you'll be sitting there,

and then suddenly you hear this explosion of people outside

as the children run in.

You're thinking about your work or whatever,