Jaime Parker, who is reprising his award-winning performance of Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, wants to change your mind about the beloved character. He knows that most people are cynical of the show, which is a two-part, five-hour sequel to J.K. Rowling’s books that opened on Broadway on Sunday night.
“You’d be forgiven for being intensely cynical going into this play,” Parker told Esquire. He said knows exactly what the show looks like from the outside. “But I defy you to be cynical when you come out.”
Esquire writes that people are greatly affected by the show, including hard-to-win critics. The London production earned eleven Olivier Awards (the U.K. equivalent to the Tony) and took home nine of them. Parker himself won his first Olivier for Best Actor. The Broadway production is likely to be a hit as well. Though Parker says that he slightly missed the Harry Potter mania when the books first came out, because he was just a little too old (though he is very close to Harry’s age in real life —the character was born in 1980, while Parker was born in 1979), he knows that the character, and the Harry Potter universe, is very personal to people.
“When you bump into people at the stage door, you see they’ve had a visceral, physical reaction to the show,” Parker told Esquire. “It’s the same for me, I think. There are a lot of personal conversations that have been provoked by the play, and that’s caught people by surprise.”
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