This has been confirmed now by Lithgow himself.

Funnily enough, I just saw him in Conclave on Sunday, which I enjoyed a lot. (Both his performance and the film in general.)

 

Hopefully he doesn’t give us angry Dumbledore like we got from Gambon.

 

Hiring someone who's 80 years old to star in a decade long adaptation is just asking for a casting mess in a few years.

 

Paapa Essiedu Is reportedly being cast to play Snape. Brb. Gonna go anon post some race bait on the Twitter real quick.

 

Seems like it's all but confirmed? Welp. Get ready for the most toxic ass discourse HP fandom has ever seen. Worse than Black Hermione in Cursed Child, and worse than "Dumbledore is Gay, actually."

Like, thankfully most HP fans are millennials, so it shouldn't be as bad as Black Tolkien Elves or Black Stormtroopers, but whoooboi.

Twitter already going sideways.

 

One of the funniest comments I saw on Twitter:

“It makes sense to have Snape be black. Harry is constantly thinking Snape is up to no good with no evidence, and eventually becomes a cop.”

 

Snape should try not looking so suspicious, eh?

 

This appointment makes me think the showrunners are quite desperate to score points with the demographic who might be sympathetic to the “Boycott Harry Potter because of JK Rowling’s tweets” crowd.

“See? We’re not bad. We cast a black guy as Snape!”

Giving the job to a guy who may well nail the role, but otherwise exhibit exactly none of the physical traits that are referenced so much in the books’ stories and jokes makes me worried about what they’re aiming to replace those elements with, though.

 

A black guy can still be a slimy bastard who bullied children because he was mad at the world. However, I have my doubts about whether the actor will want or be allowed to play Snape this way. I think they'll lean into the antihero angle and make Snape a noble asshole. I mean, sure, reinterpret the character, it's an adaptation. It may be a great Snape. It won't be book canon Snape.

 

You have to consider that the book canon Snape was explicitly crafted as a plot device to first mislead the reader and then do a shocking reveal at the end—multiple times. The original movie casting of Alan Rickman in the role was done before the release of OotP, and there was still plenty of genuine mystery left to that character. Trying to do the same now would be simply misguided as the his character arc has been thoroughly "spoiled", and honestly the book canon Snape is not that compelling of a character when looked in the context of the entire story, not just as a first time reader.

 

I'm just upset the Snape actor isn't, finally, fucking ugly. Like come on, let's have some balls here.

 

I don't see why you can't have a Snape who is both "a good guy" and also a loser who bullies children. I just doubt that the producers will want that kind of Snape rather than an antihero straight out of a Snapewife's wet dream.

 

I’m just waiting for the eventual “Harry, your dad and his friends bullied Snape because of his skin color. And your mother could never date a black man in the 1970s so Snape grew bitter and joined an alt-right supremacy group,” storyline. I can just imagine the show runners giving themselves a round of applause for coming up with that.

 

If you assume the show runners will lean into the retarded side of woke then it's quite forward of you to assume they'll allow a black guy to be portrayed as having been a member of wizard KKK.

 

They'll go "Snape was always on Dumbledore's side and he couldn't be with Lily because he had to be a spy"

 

And just like that they have killed this before even one scene has been filmed. Impressive. No one is happy with this and the uproar SHOULD stop them from doing this casting because absolutely no one thinks this is a good casting decision.

 

I disagree. I've this this doomer take be hilariously and wildly incorrect about so many IP's over the last 10 years that it's essentially the mating call of the terminally online brain rotted moron.

Basing casting off of Twitter responses is like basing your taste in food by scooping a handful of shit out of a Coachella portapottie and slurping it done.

 

Nah, they've ruined it like the ruined Wheel of Time. These showrunners keep trying to do "their art", failing to realize the property was the art and they're just there to get it on screen.

 

This would be true if they made the shows for the people who had read the original work. And I wish they did.

But they're aiming for mass appeal as the metric for success.

 

Which is why I'm basically done with watching new adaptations of things I love. Planning on watching Villeneuve's third Dune and that's it.