We still have some time before Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone is available to stream with an HBO Max subscription. In the meantime, though rest assured that the team did all it could to ensure the series was ready for the 2026 TV schedule. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman talked about the tight deadlines for the series, in part because they had to adhere to specific guidelines with the child actors. And, honestly, I never imagined how "brutal" the process would be.
The producers of the upcoming Harry Potter series had a ton of children audition and, while Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout, and Arabella Stanton have the honor of playing Harry, Ron, and Hermione, respectively, it doesn't mean they get to cease their studies and abandon school entirely. That makes sense, though Goldman told Andre Pilli that working with kids added a layer of difficulty to the filming process:
You have to shoot really fast, and the faster you go, the more you compromise quality. There’s no way around it, right? Obviously, we have a lot of resources, but it’s brutal. The kids’ screentime is really brutal.
I don't think Adriano Goldman is advocating that child actors shouldn't be learning and spend all of their free time on the set, but rather acknowledging that working with children presents a lot more problems than with an all-adult cast. This is more inside baseball and how the bread is made, presenting the technical part to filming people may not understand. This is an intriguing layer to production that I didn't really consider against the backdrop of such a massive production.
Of course, filming a show with kids is not new in the industry, and Goldman confirmed they have ways of making it work. He shared the secret, and I can certainly understand why this particular method would be helpful:
So, the methodology is very specific. You practically have to pre-shoot all the scenes while they’re in class.
Adriano Goldman said that because of the time constraints with child actors, he and the crew of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone try to pre-shoot as much of the scene as possible, so that they can focus solely on the scenes with the children when they're available. He noted that it added to the difficulty because the filming of a scene is often done out of sequence, but I would imagine it's better than trying to do it the proper way with the allotted time they have with the young stars.
As for what that time is, Goldman explained that they'll usually have an hour and a half in the morning, and then the kids can return in the afternoon after school. While he spoke to it being though from a production standpoint, I can't help but feel for 12-year-old Dominic McLaughlin, who had to go straight from school to set on a daily basis!
It's a lot of work for everyone involved, but I hope the sight of that first look at the HP show makes it all worth it in the end for the cast and crew. Obviously, there are going to be a lot of critiques about Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone and, while veteran actors like Paapa Essiedu and Nick Frost are prepared for that, I hope the younger cast is as well.
The Philosopher's Stone is primed to provide a fresh take on the Wizarding World and, given the TV medium, there's more time to focus on events that happened in the books that the movies left out. I'm excited to see those added bits most of all, especially the scenes that feature the ghosts, who were largely left out of the movies when they were made. In the meantime, though, I'm hopeful that the cast and crew continue to work through that grueling filming schedule accordingly.
Harry Potter is set to arrive on HBO and HBO Max this Christmas. I'm going to be watching while unwrapping gifts and hope to hear that others are doing the same this holiday season.
