Nick Frost revealed the quirky steps he went through to land the role of Rubeus Hagrid in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter TV reboot.
Frost explained in an interview with The Guardian that prior to his audition, he watched all eight of the original Harry Potter films with his family every Christmas. While watching the source material many times and being a fan of the franchise isn't very surprising, judging by Harry Potter's massive following, Frost took it to a new level. He revealed that he also wrote Hagrid's name around 7,000 times.
The actor said that the reason behind writing the character's name so many times was that his partner actually suggested it. The night before his audition, he decided to "manifest" himself by getting the role into the universe. So, he wrote Hagrid thousands of times while rewatching the original films, and it worked. Granted, the actor's talent was most likely what landed him the role, but his backstory makes him all the more interesting.
I’ve seen all the films. We go through them all as a family during Christmas every year. We start on 20 December and finish a week and a half later. Before I was cast as Hagrid, my partner suggested trying to manifest it. So last Christmas, I watched all the films back to back on the Sky Harry Potter channel, while writing out the word “Hagrid” 7,000 times.
Although Frost won over the people in charge of casting for HBO's reboot, several people were skeptical, including the director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chris Columbus. The filmmaker expressed mixed emotions about the upcoming series during an appearance on The Rest Is Entertainmentpodcast. He agreed that the actor definitely looked the part, but he was puzzled as to why the network was even bothering to reboot Harry Potter if so many things were going to stay the same.
Although many fans brushed off Columbus' comments, he did make a fairly good point regarding the show as a whole and not its actors. HBO's Harry Potter remake will keep a lot of the same elements, including hiring Warwick Davis to reprise his role as Professor Flitwick. While not inherently a bad thing, Columbus stated that all these similarities do defeat the purpose of a remake, which is supposed to be something new and give audiences something that they haven't seen yet. However, he did make it absolutely clear that he was still very excited about the reboot, and this was really just a one-off complaint.
So, I’m seeing these photographs and [Nick Frost is] wearing the exact same costume that we designed for Hagrid. Part of me was like: What’s the point? I thought the costumes and everything was going to be different, but it’s more of the same. It’s all going to be the same. It’s very flattering for me, because I’m like, that’s exactly the Hagrid costume that we designed. So, part of it is really exciting, so I’m excited to see what they’re going to do with it. Part of it is sort of deja vu all over again.
The director admitted that one of the reasons why he might be so conflicted was because of how close he was to the original Hagrid actor, the late Robbie Coltrane. In an interview with The Standard, Columbus revealed that he did encounter Frost after his initial comments, and he explained to him why he felt the way he did.
I said, ‘This is very surreal for me — you have to understand, Robbie Coltrane and I were so close.’ So it’s just weird, bizarre.
