The “cringe-worthy, horrendous, exposing, and traumatising” audition Paapa Essiedu would rather forget
2026 is likely to be an interesting one for Paapa Essiedu, the British actor who has been doing some superb work over the last five years or so on TV and in movies, and it’s not just because he’s making a new version of The Thomas Crown Affair with man of the moment Michael B Jordan.
No, the reason the remaining eight months of the year will be a challenge for Essiedu, as he’s already discovered, is that the hype machine for the Harry Potter reboot series from HBO Max is kicking fully into gear, and he is at the heart of the controversy around it.
The internet, of course, is not a haven for well-reasoned, unbiased opinion, but is a global forum on which many of the most unhinged people have a medium through which they can direct bile toward anyone they feel like, often about the most ludicrous and inconsequential stuff imaginable, including what skin colour a made up teacher in a made up book about a schoolboy wizard should have.
Because Essiedu is the new Professor Severus Snape in the series, a character that, yes, is extremely beloved in the form of the late Alan Rickman in the eight films that spanned the years 2001 to 2011. And, yes, there are obvious issues with the flashback scenes in which a young Snape is bullied at school by Potter’s father and his gang, but Essiedu has spoken this month about how he is having to put up with literal death threats before an episode of the series has even been broadcast, just for having the temerity to essentially just say ‘Yeah, I’ll do that, it sounds fun’.
What seems to have been missed by those screaming obsessives online is that Essiedu is an insanely talented actor, something he’s proved in shows like Gangs of London, Black Mirror and I May Destroy You, and so will no doubt bring something completely different to the role of Snape, regardless of how JK Rowling described the character in a book more than 30 years ago.
He is a Royal Shakespeare Company-trained actor with 13 years of experience working in film and TV, so the likelihood is he’s probably going to be pretty good.
That’s not to say that his path to booking a show of this size and importance has been plain sailing, however, as Essiedu himself pointed out to Backstage after being asked about his worst auditions, saying, “I’ve got so many. I auditioned for this commercial, and the brief was to play an ‘international RnB superstar’. But there was no script, so you just have to turn up and be that. The night before, at like 11:59pm, they sent a song I had to sing. I’m not a singer. At this point, Ne-Yo was a big thing, so I went dressed as him with a trilby hat, waistcoat and jeans and the whitest trainers.”
Predictably, the audition did not go well, but the experience was worse than he could have imagined, as he turned up to lip sync a song he had never heard, nor remembered the lyrics to. “And then the woman is like: ‘Now get the audience to scream for you’. And remember, I’m doing this to an empty chair. And she’s like: ‘Yeah, now to the people in the back, get them going!’ And it was just the most cringe-worthy, horrendous, exposing and traumatising experience you can imagine. And obviously, I didn’t get the part,” he declared strongly.
Before the whole Potter furore reaches a crescendo when the series hits screens this Christmas, Essiedu will be seen in a new TV series called Falling with Keeley Hawes and a movie with Ella Purnell and Rhys Ifans about a horde of killer squirrels attacking an eco cafe, called The Scurry. No, that isn’t a lie.
