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Celebrate Harry Potter's Birthday With This CURSED CHILD Opening Night Throwback!
May 17, 2024
Today is quite the magical day because it's the birthday of one of the most famous wizards in the wizarding world, Harry Potter! To celebrate the special occasion, we're looking back at opening night of The Boy Who Lived's venture on Broadway: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child! Hop on the Hogwarts Express and check out the video to see Jamie Parker, Sam Clemmett, Anthony Boyle, and more on the special night!
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World. The West End's biggest hit, Harry
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Potter and the Cursed Child parts one and two, which won a record-breaking nine
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Olivier Awards, has come to Broadway's Lyric Theatre and we're here on opening
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night where we caught up with the company just minutes after the opening night curtain rang down. Welcome to Broadway, it's your debut, how does it
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feel? Like a kid, I mean I was here 12 years ago and by then I was
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playing a schoolboy, you know, and now I'm surrounded by people in school
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uniform and stuff but somehow I'm playing the dad. I don't know when that happened, you know, I've done a lot of father-son plays and I always used to
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play the son and suddenly I've turned up now I'm playing the dad. But you can't
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help but feel like a kid, the sort of credulity that the magic and the story
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drums up in people. Most of our audience are first-generation Potterheads and
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they're also bringing their children now, you know, so you're sharing this
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sort of advent of parenthood with those first-generation and you're sharing the
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introduction to the world with these new, and everyone's eyes become younger, they
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just do, and the audible gasps of, you know, like the movie version of going to
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the theatre, you hear this sound of astonishment and it can't help but sort
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of rejuvenate you, you know. Welcome to Broadway, it is your debut, how does it
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feel? It's an extraordinary feeling, it's an extraordinary feeling. I've got so
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many emotions about it. I had to take myself off between the two shows today
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just to walk down towards the river because it's a beautiful day today, very
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quiet and I just, I was trying to remember all the people that I love
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saying to me, enjoy this moment, enjoy this moment, and I had to walk around
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going, I never ever believed that I would be here and it was stillness and I'm
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doing one of the most extraordinary pieces of storytelling and production I've ever been involved in and as a very good friend of mine said a long time
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ago, Noma, you could have been awful, but you know what, I think it kind of works
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Brilliant. I'm really trying to enjoy it and this is an extraordinary feeling, this is my
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Broadway debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, it's great. I'm doing a play
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in front of loads of people I love and it's been made with such love
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our play, with such great skillful people, starting from the top, starting
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from our Queen, JK Rowling, we've been gifted these beautiful characters which
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people love and we've been allowed to make a play by really gifted people like
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Jack Thorne and John Tiffany and Stephen Hoggett. I genuinely don't have
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to do much, it's a total privilege to be here doing this play for the people that
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love Harry Potter and everything about it, with my mates, you know, I've come over
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here with a lot of my beautiful friends, it's lovely. The thing with this story is
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there is so much humanity within this story and the rest of the canon, you know
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that, you know, our characters are so rich and this play deals with universal themes that we all have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, be it family, love
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grief, isolation, fathers and sons, you can go on and any audience member can
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empathise with one of them characters on that stage at that given moment because
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it is such a human story and to be able to tell that means an awful lot and all
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the Harry Potter fandom and all the magic and all that stuff, you kind of get that
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for free and it's a joyous thing. Well I love who you play also because it's not
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just a father-son story but it's also a friendship story with the
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person who becomes your best friend. Yeah, a gorgeous, gorgeous friendship, I mean
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it's two very misunderstood young lads that don't fit in with anyone
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find each other and can be their nerdy, geeky, wonderful selves with each other
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and it's a very special thing. I myself was bullied a bit at school and I
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eventually found a group of friends that I fitted in with and sort of came out of
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my shell somewhat, so yeah, it's a really wonderful thing to play with Anthony, really wonderful. I think it's just, for me anyway, it's just about being
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a lost boy who finds a friend and loves him and will do anything to be with him
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Friendship for me is what the show is about and fathers and time-turners and a
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hundred different other things. Just being here on Broadway, how cool that is
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for you. Amazing man, just it's so beautiful to be part of this community
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like you guys have really welcomed us with open arms and it just feels very
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special, yeah. Feels amazing, I'm still processing it. I'm moved, excited, welcomed
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I've been really, people have been so lovely and you know this is a big show
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in many ways but it's also a really delicate, precise show and that means
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that we can hold on to that and share that which is really lovely. This story
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carries its own stardom so you're free to cast actors and I'm not saying there's
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anything wrong with stars but we're all an ensemble, we genuinely are and the
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talent and the humour and the kindness is just, you know, it's just all there
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So we're gonna make friends here, we already have, you know. The show was a really good show tonight which always feels good because you kind
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of get a bit worried that there's an energy around the building and you don't
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want it to affect the work that we've done and it didn't and it actually
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enhanced it. Yeah and Jack Thorne said it was the best he's ever seen it so, result
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Talk about the role that you play, you play him so beautifully and what it's
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like living in this world of Harry Potter. It's an extraordinary world. I
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mean it is an absolute honour to play Draco's Redemption. The places that he
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was in, particularly in those finals, those final stories of the books and
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everything that was on the page in that and then take it to a place where we saw
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why he made the choices he makes and why he is an unbelievable father
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This production company, Sonya Friedman Productions, they've built such an incredible bubble around us. They've made us feel so safe, they've made us feel so
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valued, they've made us understand that our work is so important so it's all
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really safe and wonderful. So you don't want to give any of these secrets away of
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who you play because what you do is so wonderful and it must be so great to
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hear the audience roar. Roar, gasp, cry, scream a couple of times when it gets
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scary. Our audience is a really really vocal and it gives us so much energy we
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love it. When you took your bow tonight, do you remember what you were thinking
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I was watching Jamie Parker, he's an incredible leader, an incredible leader
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watching to take our cue off of him it's been a beautiful thing to watch him lead
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the group
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