How will the Harry Potter series manage the age of its young actors?

For HBO, the challenge will be to shoot one season per year to prevent the young performers of Harry, Ron and Hermione from growing up too quickly. But boss Casey Bloys hardly believes it…

The syndrome Stranger Things risk of hitting too Harry Potter. Hawkins' children grew up too fast for the story of the Upside Down, and the series adaptation of the books of Rowling will inevitably encounter the same natural problem.

So how can we best manage the aging of the young stars in the cast of the future series? Harry Potter ?

We know that the production is looking for child actors who will be between 9 and 11 years old in April 2025, and who will be able to play the budding wizards of Hogwarts. But how old will they be when season 2 is filmed? Season 3? Season 7?

“It’s a problem we’re thinking about.” admits HBO boss Casey Bloys to American journalists (via TVLine). “One of the ideas we have to solve this problem is to possibly film the first and second seasons on dates very close to each other. Because between 11 and 13 years old, it's is a huge moment in the lives of children, a leap in life, in their growth.”

HBO could therefore film season 1 and season 2 back to back (or almost). After this pivotal moment, Bloys believes that time will be less pressing: “You can get by for about 13 to 15 years. There, children age more slowly. So we're going to have to think about planning and filming so that they don't grow too much between seasons. But we are obviously taking this into consideration now.”

In this context, does Harry Potter will it be based on annual broadcasting, that is to say one season per year? We know that major HBO productions, like House of the Dragoncan only be released every two years. “I wish there was a solution so that we release a new season every year. But that's not actually possible.” the boss of the series derived from Game of ThronesRyan Condal. “Just to film, it takes a year of preparation and filming. And then you add six months for post-production and that's already 18 months gone…”

Which makes Casey Bloys say that, even if the series Harry Potter continues filming, “an annual schedule (broadcast and production) will be difficult to maintain. In fact it will depend on what is written in advance“. In other words, the pressure is on the showrunner today Francesca Gardiner (At the crossroads of worlds), so that she can write as many scripts as possible in advance, even before the start of filming for season 1. The further ahead the production is, the faster it can go.

Moreover, in this sense, HBO already seems ready to postpone the launch of the series by a few months. Evoked for 2026 by Warner Bros. it would in fact be more for 2027: “When we started all of this, we kind of anticipated that it could probably come out in 2027 or something like that. But don't take all of that at face value, because we're just starting the writing and casting process“.