My advice to the new Harry Potter kids – by a Game of Thrones child star

As Brandon Stark in Game of Thrones, Isaac Hempstead Wright spent a decade in the spotlight. He tells how the new Harry Potter stars can enjoy fame, survive social media and emerge unscathed.

The next generation of Harry Potter stars – for television. From left, Arabella Stanton, Dominic McLaughlin, and Alastair Stout will portray Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley in the HBO series. Picture: AP

It’s quite something for a 10-year-old to be cast in a television show that will be watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. In May the three young leads of the new Harry Potter TV series were announced: Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton and Alastair Stout, who will play Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley respectively.

Soon these three unknowns, plucked from more than 30,000 who did an open audition, all of whom had to be aged between nine and 11 this April, will start wielding their wands for the cameras and receiving life-changing pay cheques. What follows will be 10 years of work as they turn JK Rowling’s seven Potter novels into a 10-part TV series for HBO for release in 2026. The Potter films grossed $US10bn. Now the cycle is beginning again.

The original Hermione, Harry and Ron: actors Daniel Radcliffe, then 11, centre, with Emma Watson, 10 and Rupert Grint, 11, who starred in the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone.

This is not a process many children go through. But when Isaac Hempstead Wright heard the news in May, it took him back to when he was selected for Game of Thrones – another HBO mega series – at exactly that age, in 2009.

He was cast as Bran Stark, a pivotal character and member of the Winterfell clan, flung from a tower by Jaime Lannister in the first episode – arguably the first marmalade-dropping moment of the smash-hit series.

He grew up in a tiny village in Kent and had never heard of HBO, let alone George RR Martin’s fantasy books. By the time the series finished, it was the biggest show on TV and complete strangers would accost him wherever he was in the world.

“What a ride they’ve got in store,” he says of the new Potter children, “because, like me, most of them are unknowns.”

So, what do they have in store? “It’s easy to concentrate, often for good reason, on some of the more difficult aspects of it,” Hempstead Wright says. “But I’m excited for them, for the experiences they’re going to have, for the parts of the world they’re going to see.”

Even with the best care from parents, producers, chaperones, co-stars, however, it’s going to be an extreme experience.

A famous early routine by comic Jack Whitehall recounts a teenage story about the time when the original Harry, Daniel Radcliffe, was locked in a cupboard by four schoolfriends at a house party, who chanted, “Magic your way out of that, dickhead!”

And when I interviewed Tom Felton, who played the peroxided bad-boy Draco Malfoy in the films, he mentioned that when he went back to his school in Surrey he would get called “the broomstick prick”.

Isaac Hempstead Wright.

Hempstead Wright as young Brandon Stark.

At least when Felton was making most of his Potter films smartphones were yet to be invented. Now we can all be citizen journalists, ready to ping around the world photographic evidence of, say, “the new Hermione” at sandwich shop Pret with her parents.

Instagram culture was in its infancy during the age of Game of Thrones; TikTok was five years away when it began.

“Twitter had pretty much just come out in 2009 when we shot the pilot,” Hempstead Wright recalls. “And I can remember one or two of the actors having it, but all being very exciting. I insisted on getting my own Twitter account, which my mum would mediate.

“You just get so excited when you have about 40 followers – let alone the millions that you get overnight now.

“We didn’t quite have the same scrutiny that you would have now. There wasn’t quite the level of hatred back then.”

Maisie Williams, who played Arya Stark (Bran’s sister) in Game of Thrones from the age of 12, said of her time on the show: “As each season passed, the pressure built and it became a little destructive. Everyone goes through that dip in confidence. That also came with puberty.”

Radcliffe and Emma Watson have been honest about their low points caused by such scrutiny. Towards the end of a Harry Potter stint that took him from age 11 to 21, Radcliffe turned to alcohol. He hasn’t had a drink since 2012.

“This all happened to me so young,” said Watson, then 19, in 2009. “It’s very hard to go back to that time and be like, ‘Did I want to do this?’ It feels very foggy.” She hasn’t made a feature film since Little Women in 2019 and is doing a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Oxford. She told Vogue that year about trying to figure out with her therapist why she didn’t enjoy her precocious success more. “Why me?” she said. “Somebody else would have enjoyed and wanted this aspect of it more than I did. And I struggle with it, I’ve wrestled a lot with the guilt around that.”

The new Potter cast has racked up some credits already. Scottish actor McLaughlin has a role in a forthcoming Sky film, Grown and in the BBC’s new adaptation of Marilyn Kaye’s novel Gifted. He also had a role in the Ralph Fiennes touring version of Macbeth when it visited the Royal Highland Centre in Edinburgh in 2024. Stout, who plays Ron Weas­ley, is the least experienced of the main trio, having only an advert for Jersey royal potatoes to his credit. Stanton, 11, is perhaps the most experienced, having starred in Matilda the Musical in the West End and played the pivotal role of Control in the London revival of Starlight Express in 2024.

Radcliffe in New York in 2024. Picture: Getty Images

Forecasts vary as to how many tens of millions each episode of the new Potter will cost but “enormous” is probably a good catch-all description for the budget. Game of Thrones was perhaps the biggest TV series in the world between its first episode going out in 2011 and when it ended in 2019.

Hempstead Wright still remembers the “enormously long contract” that HBO gave them for what was always due to be several years’ work (albeit he didn’t realise it would last until he was 20).

“At the time I didn’t have an agent. I had my local drama teacher, because similar to these new Potter kids it was an open casting call. So people from schools, from drama clubs had gone, and I think my drama teacher sent the contract back to my family and said, ‘I managed to get to page four, see how you do.’ So yeah, initially it’s a bit of an overwhelming moment.

“And, for me as a kid, I didn’t real­ly know what was going on. I just thought, ‘Gosh, this will be exciting. This is a sort of fun extracurricular activity.’ But there were real conversations between my parents, weighing up whether it’s something you should let your child go into. There were discussions between them whether to actually, sort of politely decline and say is this just going to be a bit of a distraction? From my perspective, thank goodness they didn’t. There could have been nothing more painful, really, than then watching what it became. Having that big ‘what if … ?’ ”

The parents of a young actor have plenty to fear from a child cosseted on a film or TV set. Returning to the real world may just be too big a drop from the buzz that comes from being the centre of attention every day and night.

That’s a risk, Hempstead Wright concedes – and, yes, there were moments in his teenage years where “the showbiz world was more alluring than being locked up in the Kent countryside”. He was as sulky as any teen for a while, he suggests.

Maisie Williams in Game of Thrones.

MWilliams in Paris in 2024. Picture: Getty Images.

What advice would he give the new Potter stars – and, by extension, his younger self?

“I followed the advice that I would give myself, which is just enjoy every minute of it, take every opportunity it affords you.”

Hempstead Wright, a classical music fan, was learning the piano while he was on the show. When the New York Philharmonic played for one of the season premieres, he was allowed to sit in one of its rehearsals. “Proper lifetime opportunity there – wow.”

He never left full-time education and flew back and forth to the set in Belfast. “A lot of filming tended to be over my summer holidays. I went to school (the selective, non-fee-paying Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham, Kent), as normal, more or less.

“I would have this slightly strange thing of having professional responsibilities in Belfast, flying back to land at Gatwick at about midday, and then getting a car directly to drop me outside school for my maths lesson. It was a strange kind of dichotomy.”

He was lucky also – though it didn’t always feel that way – that his mother was his chaperone, travelling between home in Kent and Belfast with him. By the time he turned 16 he felt it was about time he went it alone. She argued he was still awfully young. They had some rows about that, but eventually she stopped chaperoning when he was 17. “She was insistent on (me) keeping at school, having other interests, not letting it totally dominate your life.”

The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey hated the cosseting on set, while playing Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, telling The Independent: “The thing I hated the most was being patronised. I didn’t like the fact that I could only be on set for a certain amount of time. I hated feeling like I was lesser or separate from the adult cast.”

At the same time that Hempstead Wright was on the Game of Thrones tour bus he was getting into physics. The TV producers even set up an interview between him and star American physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. “So it was a bit like being a competition winner. I think if you have that attitude to it, of never sort of taking it for granted, (being aware of) what an opportunity this is at every juncture, then you can’t go far wrong.”

He went on to do a bachelor of science in neuroscience degree at University College London and focusing on the neurology of eye movements, which led to him authoring a paper on oculomotor changes in progressive supranuclear palsy. Ultimately Hempstead Wright turned his back on acting. Now 26, he is doing clinical training in London.

All told he spent a decade as Bran Stark in the made-up land of Westeros. And today? “I can go to any country in the world and there will be someone who’s pleased to see me. You go to some little bar in Madrid or wherever, and somebody will want to strike up a chat with you. It’s made the world a much smaller place.”

The Times