Peter Serafinowicz has been cast as Peeves the Poltergeist in HBO’s Harry Potter series, giving the trickster ghost a place in live action after he was left out of the original films. The role goes to an actor whose credits range from Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace to Big Daddy in Sing and Sing 2.
The casting matters because Harry Potter is about to return with a fresh structure: a seven-season adaptation with each season built around one novel, launching this December exclusively on HBO and HBO Max. Alongside Serafinowicz, Dominic McLaughlin is set to play Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton will play Hermione Granger, Alastair Stout is Ron Weasley, John Lithgow is Dumbledore, Janet McTeer is Professor McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu plays Snape and Nick Frost has been cast as Rubeus Hagrid. Francesca Gardiner is writing and executive producing, with Mark Mylod directing multiple episodes.
Peeves has always been the kind of character that fans notice when he is missing. He is a cheeky ghost who causes trouble in the Hogwarts halls, and he did not appear in any of the original Harry Potter movies. Rik Mayall had been set to play him in that film series before the role was cut because of time constraints, a decision that has lingered over the character ever since. Mayall died in 2014, which has left the part one of the franchise’s most talked-about omissions.
That history gives Serafinowicz’s casting extra weight. He recently appeared in the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, and his résumé also includes Edgar Covington in Parks and Recreation and Denarian Saal in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014. He has the voice and timing to make Peeves work, but HBO has not said where or how often the character will appear. The larger promise of this adaptation is that it can use the extra room of television to put back what the films dropped. Season 2 is already in production, so the question now is not whether Peeves exists in this world, but how far HBO will let him go once the series begins this December.
