The spell is cast on the new Harry Potter stars

On Tuesday, HBO announced the lead casting for their TV adaptation of the Harry Potter series, with Dominic McLaughlin to star as Harry, Arabella Stanton as Hermione and Alastair Stout as Ron, selected out of 30,000 children who auditioned for the open call.

Production will likely insist these children will be safeguarded against the sharp end of celebrity, just like their predecessors. But the culture this new trio has entered is more warped and doomed than we could have conceived of in 2000.

These children have been set up for a life of obsessive over-exposure, which will be inescapable by the time the new series airs. Tabloid culture is not as explicitly nasty as it was in the noughties, but it is now part of an 24-hour online churn cycle where even the most mundane paparazzi shots become the basis of implicitly ugly press.

Of course, celebrity shaming and harassment in 2025 doesn’t just come from mainstream press – or only the most stalkerish superfans – but via cruel, mindless social media commentary happening every minute. Smartphone surveillance means, from now, these children will rarely get to exist in public without being photographed and videoed for a growing audience of internet stans and anti-fans.

The original Harry Potter also premiered before the era of deepfakes and generative AI, of which these hyper-visible actors will undoubtedly become a popular subject, even if they don’t have their own social media accounts.

These issues are all already insurmountable before you consider the additional controversy surrounding this reboot. JK Rowling is on as executive producer and her views on trans issues have led to calls for boycotts of the new series. This is not the universally-beloved Potter of 25 years ago.

Radcliffe credits his strong family unit for why he coped with child stardom, even helping him overcome his reliance on alcohol while filming the later Harry Potter movies. I’m sure these children’s parents and guardians, and HBO, will sincerely work towards cultivating the same resilience. But we are wrong to think the formula that spared the first three is replicable – or anything more than a lucky accident.