J.K. Rowling tweeted her enthusiastic support — "Rowling loves black Hermione" — of the casting of African-American actress Noma Dumezweni to play the lead female character in the upcoming play "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child."
The announcement that Dumezweni will play Hermione Granger in the London stage production of the play, which revisits Granger, Potter, and Ron Weasley 19 years after they've defeated Voldemort, caused chatter and some consternation online. When asked what she thought about Dumezweni's skin color, Rowling was clear: "Brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified."
The range of emotions online about the play's race switch from the film version, in which white Emma Watson portrayed Hermione, was vast.
But some always felt Hermione was black.
Stephen Bush, of the New Statesman, said he, for one, was shocked that the on-screen version of the character was white.
"Granger — unlike Harry Potter himself, or Ron Weasley, his best friend and Granger’s love interest — is never given a skin colour in the books . . . I, at least, always imagined her as black, partly because, when she wows her fellow pupils at the Yule Ball in Goblet of Fire, she straightens her hair, which was, almost without exception, how in my part of East London, everyone’s older sister prepared for a night out."
"So I was horrified a year later when Watson — exceptionally white, no frizzy hair, and without Granger’s prominent teeth — was cast in the role. How could Hermione be white?" he wrote.
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