HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’ reboot sparks backlash over Snape casting: ‘The West has fallen’

HBO’s new “Harry Potter” series has released an official trailer — and one character in particular has fans in an uproar.

That character is Snape, who is remembered by fans as a deathly pale older white man played by the late Alan Rickman — whose long, jet-black hair and dark, broody eyes only accentuated his spooky skin tone.

“It was being advertised as being wholly faithful to the original source material. You know, it was meant to show audiences that everything the movies were not able to communicate, now we are going to communicate that through the show,” BlazeTV host John Doyle comments.

“And then rumors began to kind of circulate around that one of the most essential characters to the story, Professor Snape, played by the late, great Alan Rickman — fantastic English actor in the original films — he would actually be getting race-swapped and portrayed by British actor named Paapa Essiedu,” he continues.

And after watching the trailer himself, Doyle calls it “disgusting.”

“It’s disgusting just because they used to recycle franchises like 50 years later. Like, they would make a movie called ‘The Smurfs’ 50 years after ‘The Smurfs’ stop being relevant. ... You would see kind of like the resurgence of these old IPs, as they’re called, well after the franchise had expired,” he explains.

“I just think it’s disgusting because of what it says about what we are able to produce creatively as a society where nobody can do anything. And so, what we have to do is basically drag these old IPs out, put a new coat of paint on them, and present them to the public with a modern cast, which is to say a diverse cast,” he continues.

Doyle also notes that this isn’t only happening in movies.

“If you look at public opinion polling on how, like, diverse Americans believe their country is, the average American — this is a fact — the average American believes that the country is 50% black. The reason for that is because every time they turn on the television, all they see are black people,” Doyle explains.

“All they see in movies, commercials are black people. ... And so, as a result, yeah, Professor Snape is a black guy,” he says, pointing out that Snape is described as “pale” with “stringy black hair, long black hair.”

“I don’t have an issue with it in the sense that, you know, the West has fallen because ‘Harry Potter’ is not the way I want it to be. ‘Harry Potter’ is not the way I want it to be because the West has fallen,” he adds.

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