- 37 minutes ago
Finding Harry The Craft Behind The Magic 2026
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00:15Some stories change us, some stories define us, but few stories live with us.
00:26And action.
00:29Quite like The Boy Who Lived, soon to be told by HBO Max, like never before.
00:49Harry's story from J.K. Rowling's beloved book series is a truly immersive tale.
00:56Requiring incredible dedication to realize this mesmerizing, almost limitless magical world.
01:03To create a place so rich, complex and expansive, building it in our world would be impossible.
01:13Until the true wizards get to work.
01:22The Harry Potter stories are this extraordinary phenomenon from 30 years ago for young people.
01:31But it struck a chord with people of all ages.
01:35And to reimagine the Harry Potter canon.
01:40To let it breathe.
01:42To tell a story in eight episodes rather than a single two-hour movie.
01:47To go down all the wonderful rabbit holes.
01:50The story is there, but we get to enact all the things that you know are going on in the
01:56wings, but you don't see them.
01:58You wait forever to do something that means that much to people.
02:03And I think this really will.
02:05And they have done a brilliant job of selecting this extraordinary ensemble.
02:20We stopped counting at 40,000.
02:22Yeah.
02:23But it wasn't a good use of our time at that point to count.
02:25But we watched all of them.
02:26Yeah.
02:27We're looking for a child who, he means so much to people in different ways.
02:33And so you are looking for a kid who perhaps on the face of it seems quite ordinary, but is
02:38ultimately very extraordinary.
02:40We wanted to make sure that all kids in the UK could audition by submitting their first auditions online.
02:45And then we went to Manchester, Scotland, Ireland and...
02:50Cardiff.
02:50Cardiff, Wales.
02:54When we were auditioning children, we knew it was going to be a long process.
02:57We started with Harry, Ron and Hermione.
02:59And they are really good friends.
03:02And so it was a really exciting challenge to find three kids that you would believe as friends with these
03:08very strong and different personalities.
03:10These are all ordinary kids, you know, but they are all extraordinary.
03:14There's magic in all of them.
03:18We saw Alastair in Manchester and he was just funny and charming from the word go.
03:24Yeah.
03:25This is him doing his...
03:26His story.
03:27His little story.
03:28Mother doesn't want a dog.
03:29She's making a mistake.
03:30Because more than a dog, I think she will not want this snake.
03:36That was the first day of Alastair.
03:38And then Arabella in London.
03:42Hermione, lack of filter from being an only child.
03:45Her superpower is her emotional intelligence.
03:48She's got main character energy.
03:49So this is Arabella's first audition.
03:53Yeah.
03:53So she did the poem Invictus.
03:55It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll.
04:00I am the master of my fate.
04:02I am the captain of my soul.
04:05Hermione has to be playful.
04:07So we got her in to do a scene where she's talking to her parents about Harry and Ron.
04:12And she got the giggles and the little snort.
04:15And that's the take we used to show them that she's playful.
04:18So you're constantly using bits of the audition that you know is going to help the kid when you show
04:22it to the director and the showrunner.
04:23So Arabella's snort was quite crucial in her casting process.
04:27Yeah.
04:28We met Dominic in Glasgow.
04:31What did we have about Harry?
04:32He's skeptical of the adult world.
04:34He's got a vulnerability and a melancholy.
04:36And a solitary, a solitary quality to him.
04:39He's grown up alone.
04:40He's grown up alone and he, he's, survival is his thing.
04:45Artful Dodger, not Oliver Twist.
04:47It's basically find an incredible actor.
04:48Basically.
04:49Yeah.
04:49That was the brief.
04:50He has so many different qualities.
04:52So many different qualities.
04:54Dominic came in and his piece was a poem about his weekend that he'd written himself.
04:59And it was rhyming.
05:00And we thought he's so interesting.
05:02My Weekend by Dominic.
05:05So we started off Saturday morning.
05:07I had a football game to play.
05:08And I can tell you, it went my way.
05:11Didn't really have anything to do after that.
05:13So I just slept the rest of the day.
05:14Dom just had this sort of quiet confidence in himself.
05:17Who do you live with?
05:17I live with my mum, my dad and my two sisters.
05:21Okay.
05:22And my dog.
05:23And have you done any acting before?
05:25I did Macbeth in January.
05:28And were you one of Macduff's sons?
05:30Yeah, I was.
05:31You got killed on talk show.
05:32Yeah, yeah.
05:33Sorry to hear that.
05:34Okay, that's great.
05:35I really feel confident in these kids.
05:38I think they're incredible.
05:45In a show of this scale, it's easy to get lost.
05:48You can go to the Great Hall.
05:49It's huge.
05:50You can go to the Quidditch pitch.
05:51It's massive.
05:52You can go to Diagon Alley.
05:54And we go back to the sets and we revisit them and add in a bit of detail.
05:57Sometimes, for example, I'll go to the Gryffindor common room or to the tower.
06:01And you're in there on your own.
06:03And you're looking around and you look at the notes board and you're looking at every little
06:06bit of detail on McGonagall's desk of the books on the spines.
06:10And it's goosebumps.
06:15The volume of this is just so fun to be able to build at a scale like this.
06:21It's just a designer's dream to play in a sandbox that's this big.
06:26We're trying to get in the joy and the playfulness of what it means to be a magical kid.
06:32When the first Harry Potter book came out, it really felt so novel and exciting.
06:37I think everyone had that shared experience of thinking what an incredible world.
06:42It would be so great to touch.
06:45And so we're trying to capture those moments of discovery that you find within the books.
06:50We want you to have that same experience here.
06:53But we are adding a level of world building that is even beyond what the audience is familiar with.
07:01Harry's introduction to the physical space of the wizarding world starts with the Leaky Cauldron.
07:07And eventually we come out the back and go into our Diagon Alley set.
07:12The elements that we see are all things that we would recognize.
07:15But how they combine and form is going to be something really new and exciting.
07:21Privet Drive and our Muggle world, we really wanted to be rooted in reality.
07:25And part of that, I think, for someone as a fan and an audience member is when your Muggle world
07:31is rooted in a reality that we're all familiar with,
07:34it makes that excitement of the wizarding world just being beyond our reach all the more enticing.
07:42There's really a ton of thought that's going into this so that for the die-hard fans, we're trying to
07:47land it.
07:48We've created these spaces that I think are going to give everybody a lot of joy to kind of be
07:54in and experience.
07:56It's just so exciting that everybody is so game to make these things come alive.
08:03Walking into the Great Hall that first time where you go, it's like walking into a cathedral.
08:08It was so magical, it's so huge, it's so beautiful.
08:13And the entrance of the children coming in, the first years coming in and then bringing them into that hall,
08:18was possibly my favourite set in that sense.
08:23It was just so iconic and so kind of symbolic of, right, here we go,
08:29a whole new bunch of kids, into this world we go, and here you are in Hogwarts and welcome,
08:34and a whole new mystery is unfolding for you.
08:37And sometimes you're in your dressing room and you'll be sitting there and here and there,
08:41and then suddenly you hear this explosion of people outside as the children run in.
08:46You're thinking about your work or whatever and they've just got their own thing with whatever it is that's going
08:50on,
08:50the way children do, it's just, it's a real energy.
08:55Sometimes on a really tiring day, I always go, close your eyes, open them again and look around.
09:03Wow!
09:04You walk onto a set and you think, wow!
09:06And it just ups your game.
09:09Because it's all just so beautiful.
09:11Beautiful.
09:17In the initial conversations with Mark and Francesca about the core values of our show,
09:21there was this kind of inherent desire to be rooted in naturalism.
09:25Also in this idea of, at the core of Harry Potter, nature is the root of magic.
09:32And so, magical realism, rooting things in principles that we find in nature and the phenomenon of the natural world.
09:43If we could harness those things, that's what magic is.
09:47These ideas of naturalism being this core principle within the wizarding world is something that we're integrating into a lot
09:54of our sets.
09:55We have to bring the natural world to them.
09:58And to think that I'm at the helm of this, it really is incredible.
10:05This project is so exciting that there's so much overlap and play between different departments to really capture these concepts
10:11and themes and express them on so many different levels.
10:16As we designed these practical and visual effects, we wanted there to be a deeply rooted logic to what was
10:23happening.
10:23Even though magic is not logical, for us it's more of these, like, consequences of magic that we're interested in.
10:29For every expression of magic, we're trying to do that critical analysis of how does this tie back into what
10:36we're saying magic actually is.
10:39And we really wanted to celebrate it as a moment to do things a little bit differently.
10:46This is one of the most exciting conversations I've had as a designer, diving into the science of something that
10:52should be unexplainable.
10:55The joy of working on a project like this is that we have so many really creative and exciting department
11:01heads.
11:01It really is such a pleasure to work with such high-level craftsmen who also are genuinely excited about this.
11:09I can proudly say you did a good job.
11:12Thank you. A very good job.
11:14Cheers.
11:15Appreciate it.
11:21My father actually designed and painted the very first Quidditch box from the first film.
11:27And here I am, 26 years later, painting the new Quidditch box for the HBO production.
11:40I actually worked on Harry Potter 3 and 4 film 25 years ago.
11:44And I was actually a trainee to some of the guys that are working here.
11:50Every creature we build within Creature Effects, whether it's an owl, a rat, whether it's a creature or a human
11:56being, all starts with the same process.
11:58Basically, extensive research into nature.
12:03Observing and looking at how an owl might move, they just look incredible.
12:08And it's our job to try and copy that movement and repeat that with the use of animatronics and creature
12:13effects.
12:13You can see within the animatronics, you've got all these pivot points and pieces of metal and plastic and servo
12:19motors.
12:20And our job is to try and make that feel organic.
12:27We are looking at essentially the culmination of a lot of teamwork.
12:32These are some early prototypes we did of how we would create this incredible neck movement that you have within
12:39owls.
12:39How they move so much, this almost 360 movement, the up and down, the turning, that we put together in
12:44fabrication.
12:46And then we hand these over to the wonderful feather team to do all their beautiful work over so that
12:52we can fill these voids and have amazing feathers that all glide and move and create that incredible motion that
12:58an owl's neck has.
12:59So we then insert each and every feather individually in the net and glue it down.
13:07And it's about 36,000 feathers per owl.
13:10And we made about 10 owls for this shirt.
13:16Because technology's moved on and we've actually got stronger and faster motors that we can actually fit inside.
13:22You can actually pick the rat lick up and push it around and bully it around.
13:25When Ron holds the animatronic, it actually pushes it aside rather than it feeling like a stuffed scabbers.
13:30Dan's actually put that into this animatronic here where as you push the feet down, it actually compresses.
13:36And I can actually move this around, you can see here, so it doesn't feel too robotic and rigid, which
13:42I think really helps the performance of a young boy who's probably never held an animatronic before in his life.
13:49And then, of course, when you put it into the context of, you know, down on the floor like that,
13:55it's really believable.
13:59We also made a biting scabbers that Charlotte's going to bring in now.
14:02Put your finger in his mouth and wiggle it around.
14:05That's it.
14:07There you go.
14:09Thank you very much.
14:12This is a dog bog, which is a character that hasn't been seen in any of the films before.
14:17It's based on a toad that has movements that we've taken directly from nature, from toads, where the eyes pull
14:23in, retract inside.
14:25We've got a mechanical tongue, nose movement, nostrils.
14:31We added this detail on top so the kids could actually snap the back off and pull these mollusks off
14:38so it doesn't feel damaging for the creature.
14:43Such an amazing opportunity for us to all come together, all departments, all disciplines, whether it was creature effects, special
14:50effects, visual effects, model making, set deck.
14:54We also created these flubber worms and characters like this that we didn't tell the kids that we're actually going
15:02to be able to pick them up and add slime.
15:07We had these fire crabs that was actually working closely with special effects and these two would actually blast fire
15:16out of their backsides at each other.
15:18So we've got a self-contained animatronic here where all the motors are inside and someone's actually operating that remotely.
15:30I'm shaking right now just being in this room, like this is, this is crazy.
15:34I was the right age and it was always there and I sort of, it was something I really, I
15:38really bonded with my siblings over.
15:40I think my cousin first introduced me to it so we used to, I mean we used to run home
15:44from primary school and change out of our, our primary school clothes and into our Hogwarts robes.
15:52We're set in 1991 and we did a full study of what people were wearing in 1991 and we tried
16:00to make the muggles feel as true as we possibly could make them.
16:05We really sort of drawn out, you know, tried to sort of create real contrast.
16:10The muggle palette is pastel orientated, very cold colours and there's a big emphasis on synthetic fabrics.
16:17As you can see here, it's really the period of shell suits, I don't, we call them shell suits, they're
16:22these crinkly tracksuit tops.
16:25I think in terms of finding Harry's luck, he lives in a world where everyone is following the fashions.
16:33He hasn't ever had the luxury of choosing his clothes, he's, he's given, he's given these old cast offs by
16:39Petunia, which are Dudley's old clothes.
16:43His clothes just hang off him and they're just greyed out.
16:47Actually everything that he wears, we found original, Beth found original pieces, which we then meticulously recreated.
16:55We're finding real clothes, sort of trawling many vintage yards and wholesale scrap yards and just finding it.
17:03And the amount we've amassed because we've costumed thousands.
17:07And the more we found this palette came naturally together, these are the colours of 1991.
17:14We want to time travel. We get to dive in and out of different timeframes, different styles of costuming.
17:20And you can't time travel if they're not exactly the right thing.
17:26Our uniforms are all made of British wool, organic cotton, shell buttons, wooden buttons, Scottish tartan.
17:35Natural cloth is, is something that is almost rare. It's quite a radical act just to wear a, a jumper
17:40that's made of sheep's wool.
17:42Even though, you know, we live in a country that's like full of sheep.
17:50For the magical people, we had to find how we present them, that feels somehow a little bit other.
17:57What Francesca and Mark really wanted us to be bringing into the design was, with lots of nature.
18:02That, that when, when we decided to use all this very imperfect natural processes, like leaf printing, like hand painting,
18:11like marbling.
18:12Marbling.
18:14When you print with leaves, there is this natural, magical process that happens.
18:19You don't know what you're going to get, depending on the leaf. You just have to go with what you
18:22get.
18:23For Dumbledore, we wanted to use leaf printing because we wanted to do this camo fabric for him to wear.
18:29And we wanted to create the sense of this natural, immediate, um, unruly process.
18:37It's the imperfection that brings the beauty.
18:39It's not kind of like a high fantasy. It's really rooted in the real.
18:45And I think that would hopefully make people think, oh, maybe, maybe it is around that corner.
18:51Or look at a person walking down the street and think, oh.
18:54I remember we kept saying, I've just seen a magical person.
18:58I've just seen a magical person.
19:00And we were photographing people like on the tube or the bus that we'd identify as sort of a magical
19:05person.
19:05And so it's this idea that magical people do exist and they are around and we wanted that to be
19:11within all of them.
19:12And just a sort of combination of elements that just made you look.
19:20And by complete contrast, we have created an inky, moody, natural palette for the magical people.
19:29So that's one way that we've created, um, a dichotomy.
19:35Everything is rooted in reality.
19:38Our Dumbledore, he is a little bit like Edwardian gentleman.
19:43Because that's what we thought.
19:44Knowing how old he is, we kind of work out as his height, his heyday.
19:49A little bit of Scottish tweed here, embroidered, as you can see, in a very unruly, not-too-perfect way.
20:00I mean, I love Harry Potter because I picked up the book when I had my children.
20:04And I got really into reading the books with my son Eric, who just loved them.
20:11He could really project himself into the story and I think it was so good for him.
20:17And I could see how much he was loving it and we were loving it together.
20:22Our thing where we'd sit down together at night and read very intricate stories with quite complicated plots and lots
20:30and lots of things happening.
20:32And he said to me,
20:33Mummy, is there a school that I can go to like this?
20:37And, um, and I thought, I need to find this school.
20:42And if I can't find it, I need to try and create this school.
20:45It definitely feels like a big responsibility.
20:48I think it's a big responsibility to get it right, isn't it?
20:52To honour what has gone before, but to hopefully, like, find more detail.
21:05I think I was literally the same age as the kids in the book, you know?
21:10I think the first one came out in 97, I was seven.
21:13Um, and I was definitely at the age where, like, the books were still coming out when I was at
21:18school.
21:19So, it was actually really intense.
21:21I remember reading those books and you wouldn't be able to talk to your mates at all.
21:26Because, like, if someone was reading faster than you were, they were going to tell you what was going to
21:30happen.
21:30And, like, these stories were so important at that age, it wasn't worth, like, the conversation with your mates.
21:37At that age, you imagine yourself being a kid at Hogwarts, or you imagine yourself being in Harry's shoes.
21:44I remember on one day, I came in to see, uh, Mark, and they were shooting the scene on platform
21:51nine and three quarters.
21:53And just walking in and seeing the real train, it was, like, being thrown into the book.
21:58It was, like, being thrown into it. It was real.
22:06So, as you can see, though the world of Harry Potter is already legendary, its legacy is still growing.
22:14As a new generation discovers its magic, an exciting new era is upon us.
22:22I knew that while I did the first season of Harry Potter, I would be turning 80 years old.
22:30That meant that I would age to about 88 before it was all over.
22:35This is an extremely difficult thing to contemplate.
22:41They're just an amazing ensemble.
22:45All of them Arabella and Alistair and Dom.
22:51What do you think? You're excited.
22:53Do you want to come and sit down?
22:55And they all adore each other.
22:58I'm really excited to see how they grow and how their artistry grows and what kind of people they grow
23:04into.
23:06They're gonna grow up with this.
23:10And, uh, and I'm gonna grow older with them.
23:17Theoretically, we could be working for many years together and they'll be young adults by then.
23:23We want them to grow up thinking, wow, it might have been hard, it might have been difficult, might have
23:28been tiring, but, boy, it was good and I'm so glad I did it.
23:31It was so exciting to be a part of it.
23:37And here we are.
23:39What better place to end this journey into the heart of Harry Potter than where he begins his journey to
23:44Hogwarts.
23:46Here we're surrounded by both unbelievable scale along with the little things that make it all feel so real.
23:54Talking about mind-blowing detail, come and have a look at this, a tiny taste of what's to come.
24:05So, all aboard.
24:07You might want to hold your ears.
24:09It's about to get very loud!
24:17This feels like my cube.
24:51The next generation of fans has been something very important to me because my son is a big Harry Potter
24:57fan.
24:57Uh, and so I cannot let the little guys down, cannot let the new generation of fans down.
25:05I know it's really important.
25:06My family worked on the original Harry Potter and I get to carry on the legacy.
25:11What a dream.
25:12I met my wife on the third Harry Potter and now my son works for me, so it's been our
25:19life, really.
25:20I started my Harry Potter experience in 1999 and 27 years later, I'm still here.
25:28I remember the first day that I was filming.
25:31We were on set on Privet Drive and we had Harry's hour with him and I just sort of looked
25:35around.
25:35It was such a pinch me moment.
25:37There's been too many good moments to count, to be honest.
25:41It's been a year of highlights.
25:43We didn't see him.
25:47We've something.
25:49We've got to catch.
25:50We've got the good moments.
25:50We've got to work.
25:50We've got to do, we've got to do so far.
25:50Go ahead.
25:51We've got to do so far.
25:51We've got to be out.
25:51You
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