SAM CLEMMETT IS THE NEW BOY WIZARD IN 'HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD'

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Harry Potter, the famous boy wizard, may get the title billing in the new theatrical hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but the story is in large part that of his son, Albus Severus Potter, who has the singular misfortune of being saddled with the names of two of his father’s departed heroes on top of his cumbersome surname. The Potter legacy weighs on the shoulders of Albus, as it does on Sam Clemmett, the 24-year-old British actor currently playing Albus on Broadway after originating the role in London in 2016. “These books and these characters mean an awful lot to the huge fan base,” he says. “So many people see so much of themselves in these characters and [Anthony Boyle, who plays Albus’s best friend Scorpius Malfoy, son of Harry’s former enemy Draco] and I are introducing two new characters to this canon so that in itself brought a lot of pressure. But as the play started the first preview in London we realized people wanted it to be good and people wanted to know what happens to these characters and where they’ve ended up psychologically and emotionally and that helped bring such a good energy into the theater.”

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child picks up in play form where the last book in JK Rowling’s iconic series, 2007’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, leaves off, nearly two decades after the death of Voldemort with Harry and his wife Ginny Weasley sending Albus off to his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Unlike his elder brother James, Albus is an introverted and withdrawn teenager, and much of the play centers on his difficult relationship with his father. Clemmett is quick to admit that Albus is not the easiest character to empathize with, and one of the most surprising things about the play is that it reveals a side of Harry most readers would never have expected. “We know Harry as a hero—he saved the Wizarding World—but now he’s on a very different journey and is having to learn to become a father,” Clemmett explains. “He’s had it very easy with James and now this slightly misunderstood young man has come into his life and can’t fit in, so you do see Harry in a very, very different light.”

The play, which opened on Broadway late last month, is already a record-breaker in a number of ways, from the nine Olivier Awards it took home in London last year to the sixty-eight million dollars it took to bring the show to West 43rd Street. It’s currently sold out for months in both cities and is up for ten Tonys this year, including Best Play. Under the direction of John Tiffany and a top-notch creative team, the show is also a groundbreaking theatrical achievement, producing effects and illusions onstage that are shockingly inventive. One particularly elaborate trick, which causes the entire stage to appear to shimmer, was met one evening by a loud “Fuck off!” from a man in the audience, Clemmett laughingly recalls. “You get a lot of reactions like that.”

Still, as with anything produced by the mind of JK Rowling, who wrote the original story adapted into the play by Jack Thorne, it is the plot and the human dynamics that connect the deepest. Beneath the spectacle and the stagecraft, Cursed Child is a story of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and their regrets, fears, and disappointments. “It is about more than just ‘Harry Potter,’” Clemmett says. “It’s about all the things that she’s written about in her canon of novels. There’s so much humanity to her stories and her characters. It’s about love and grief and isolation and friendship and growing up, all these universal themes we all have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Yes, there’s the magic and physically it’s a beautiful thing to watch, but you kind of get all that for free because people are clinging onto the story and these characters.”

Any undertaking as sprawling as Cursed Child comes with its own creation myth and Clemmett says he recalls hearing rumors about the play for years before he first auditioned in July 2015. After four months of recalls and workshops, he was finally offered the part of Albus while preparing a role in the play Wendy & Peter Pan with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s one of those calls I’ll never forget,” he laughs. “I was on my lunch break and we were just about to do a final run-through and my agent called and he was waffling on for ages and then he said, ‘You’ve just been offered Harry Potter and the part of Albus.’ At that point, even he didn’t know what the part of Albus was but from what I’d told him, he knew it was a big deal. I lost my shit and I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone! I needed to go and scream at someone in the theater but instead, I just called my mom and dad and they started losing their minds. Then there was that point when I put the phone down and, having read it and worked on it for a week, went, Jeez, I’ve got do it now, because it is a beast.”

Clemmett is no stranger to the stage, although Cursed Child is undeniably on a completely different level from anything he’s experienced before. As a “shy and introverted” child who was “never that good at sports,” he joined a drama group in his hometown of Norwich at a young age and continued with them for years before being accepted to a two-week intensive with the National Youth Theatre in London at sixteen, where he first began to consider acting as a career. He saw an audition notice for a play adaptation of Lord of the Flies and made his professional début as one of the ten main boys, the only actor among them without an agent. After the show’s run, Clemmett auditioned for drama schools and spent two years on the waiting list before becoming increasingly frustrated with his prospects. He took time off and landed Wendy & Peter Pan, still intent on returning to school afterwards. Then came the call for Albus. “I was like, Well, it’s definitely not happening now,” he laughs.

An avowed Hufflepuff—confirmed by Pottermore—Clemmett says he grew up reading the books and watching the films and was excited to revisit them when he joined Cursed Child, particularly the epilogue of Deathly Hallows, “the only seven pages Albus is in,” he laughs. “One of the nice things for me and Anto [Boyle] is we don’t have seven books to go on like the other guys do,” he adds. “John Tiffany said to us at the beginning, ‘You’ve got a blank canvas,’ and over the first two or three weeks, we had endless discussions about these families and what happened leading up to the day they’re on Platform 9 ¾ and just started to add flesh to the bones.”

There are few bigger brands in the world than Harry Potter and, as Clemmett settles into the rest of his yearlong run, he recognizes that the show is providing a unique experience for a rabid fan base, one that has read every book and watched every film multiple times, visited the theme parks, and turns up to the Lyric Theatre dressed in full Gryffindor regalia. “One of the most special things about this play is we’re introducing a lot of people to a new form of storytelling,” he says, noting that sixty percent of audience members in the first six months of the London run were first-time theatergoers. “The fans at the stage door see a lot of themselves within all these characters. People who feel isolated in their own lives have found a community at the theater where they fit in and feel included.”

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is currently running at the Lyric Theatre, New York.