John Lithgow is a treasure, but I agree. Gambon was 15 years younger when he was cast as Dumbledore. Richard Harris was 70 in Philosopher's Stone. Casting Lithgow is just asking for possibly having to recast in the middle of the show's run.

edit: My wildcard choice would be to roll up to Daniel Day-Lewis' house with a few trucks of money.

 

His wife would hate you if he agreed to play Dumbledore for 10 years.

 

I just hope they dont try to make Snape too likeable, the movies shyed away too much from showing his spitefullness and cruelty, and instead tried too hard to get you to like him.
He can look however you want, but I want to see him bully children, show his former past as a death eater(including getting the potters killed and calling Lily a mudblood) and not pretend he secretly liked Harry.

 

Maybe they are banking on John Lithgow dying half way through filming. Free marketing.

 

Well, the new show's done one thing for us already. Here I thought the wells were dry, but there you go, new memes.

 

After all this time, it is now clear Snape was meant to be black. Always...

 

All kidding aside, it is an interesting casting choice for Snape. The worst thing this show can turn out to be is boring. This at least gets the viewers to buy in far enough to see Snape onscreen.

 

Not if it makes me not want to watch the show. We had a similar discussion on this forum some years ago when the Corlys Velaryon casting was announced for House of the Dragon. Some argued that judgement should be withheld until actually watching the show, as it was still possible the show would be a good adaptation and it was presumptuous to assume the actor couldn't do a perfectly good job despite not resembling the canon description of the character's appearance.

I actually agree with the sentiment of this argument, I just don't have any trust for Hollywood's (more specifically in both examples HBO's) ability to adapt stories in this day and age, and this sort of casting (especially when the change in race of a character has larger implications for the overall story, as it did for the Velaryons and their Valyrian ancestry/relationship with the Targaryens and as it will for Snape as many have already outlined) has in my experiences of late unfortunately been a red flag that they don't care for staying true to the important elements of the overall narrative.

As an actor divorced from the context of the character he is playing, Steve Toussaint did a fine job as Corlys (in season 1 when actually given decent material instead of aimlessly wandering around a shipyard repeating the same conversation) and I'm sure Paapa Essiedu would similarly do a fine job depicting a new version of Snape. Unfortunately though, and while I'd love to be proven wrong, I feel safe in making the assumption that like House of the Dragon in a few years the actor playing Snape will prove to be least of a Harry Potter fan's concerns in comparison to the multitude of other ways they will butcher this adaptation. I'm sure the writers of this show will find all sorts of horrifying ways to narcissistically "make the story their own" - as if it was their writing ability the audience came to see, and not that of the author of the highest selling book series of all time.

In this case though we don't even have to rely on assumptions to believe this - instead you can listen to the words of one of the writers - Andy Greenwald - speaking about the show before he was hired to work on it:

 

Yeah, I expected this to be corporate slop way before any casting was announced. Shows and movies in general don't seem to have much true passion put into them anymore. Netflix literally admitted they dumb down their content to appeal to distracted watchers, and I doubt other streaming services are much different.

 

Indeed, I would think that, having seen what we have from other more recent adaptations and retellings on the big or the small screen, not seeing the implications of this casting with regards to the depiction of the character would be alarming in itself. Almost everything nowadays is slop made as an attempt by studio-owning companies to print money to increase their profit margins, there isn’t any passion or interest in making something good because it takes time and effort and willingness and those are nothing but risks in the eyes of the people sitting around tables and looking at graphs for a living.

I mean, honestly, I think that the casting of Snape shouldn’t even be the first warning sign. The first should have been the news of the show being made in the first place. Who cares that Snape is played by a black man, the whole show will have ghastly cgi everywhere, mediocre writing/dialogue/exposition and costumes and accessories that look like they’re from Wish if they even bother to dress the characters in robes unlike the movies and every official media that came out since, otherwise the costumes will look like they come from the closest brand clothing store from the studio.

Also, it’s not like this project will ever see the end, lmao. Netflix’s Avatar has the advantage of only having three seasons, that’s a manageable length. No way can HBO trickle out a minimum of seven seasons for a show when its ratings will without a doubt have the higher ups pull out the plug like with every show in this day and age.

TL;DR: The time for giving the benefit of the doubt to studios and companies that present dogshit content on the regular in such a manner that it would see everyone involved bear a dark mark until the heat death of the universe and beyond in a reasonable world should be long time over.

 

I will watch at least the first season because I'm a Potterhead, but my expectations for anything these days is zero by default. Once in a while a truly remarkable film/show comes along (Andor from ep 4 onward, Top Gun Maverick, Dune movies) and I enjoy those. Hell, even David Fincher disappointed me with his last movie.

 

Think of the fanfic possibilities: mentor!Snape takes Dean Thomas under his wing to teach him how to swing that basilisk and chase after red bush. Bigbro!Snape rulez.