Black Actress To Play Hermione In Harry Potter Play

Jamie Parker will play the title role in the Potter play, while Paul Thornley will co-star as his friend Ron Weasley.

Rowling said on Twitter that the character’s skin colour had in fact never been specified in the books.

The best-selling author of the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling, was fast to shut down all negative comments.

AHEM. Did you know that Harry Potter isn’t real and Emma Watson really isn’t Hermione Granger?

J. K. Rowling is forever tweeting about the mystical world she created, so it was only a matter of time before she broke her silence on the subject. Rowling developed the new two-part play, set 19 years after the last Potter novel, with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany.

“Of course Hermione Granger’s black”, Stephen Bush wrote in an opinion piece for the English magazine New Statesman. The news of Dumezweni’s casting in the roll was received with overwhelming positivity by Potter fans, despite racist grumblings from close-minded Twitter users.

But some of the responses to the casting of Dumezweni reveal that not everyone in the fandom was aware of this concept, and seem unable to accept that an award-winning British actress who happens to be black could play Hermione.

She seemingly showed her support of the casting choice by retweeting Matt Lewis (Neville Longbottom in the original films), who pointed out that his character was originally written as a blond.

The rest of the cast has not yet been released, but the official plot line reads: “It was always hard being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children”. Harry will be played by Jamie Parker, Paul Thornley will play Ron, and Noma Dumezweni will play Hermione. As she stated, canon never specified skin color.

Fans of the books and the films have long since known about The Cursed Child, which is scheduled to open on July 30, 2016 at the Palace Theatre in London.