HBO Finally Has Its Ginny Weasley, and Just Cast Dobby and Tom Riddle Too
HBO has resolved its Ginny Weasley recast with Bonnie Hill, and revealed Lenny Rush as Dobby and Billy Barratt as Tom Riddle: three Chamber of Secrets castings at once.
Two months after we told you Ginny Weasley’s recast search was down to the wire, HBO has answered the question and thrown in two more castings nobody expected this week.
Bonnie Hill has been cast as Ginny Weasley, closing out the urgent open casting call that opened in July after Gracie Cochrane exited the role. In the same announcement, HBO revealed Lenny Rush as Dobby and Billy Barratt as Tom Riddle, all three cast specifically for Season 2, Chamber of Secrets.
All three are load-bearing in the same plot
Chamber of Secrets leans harder on its new characters than any other book in the series. Dobby’s warnings open the plot, Ginny’s possession drives it, and Riddle’s diary is the villain underneath all of it. Announcing the trio together reads like HBO wanting the full core of Season 2’s mystery locked before pre-production got much further. The show is at Leavesden Studios now, with filming expected this autumn.
Billy Barratt is an International Emmy winner
He is the youngest ever to win Best Performance by an Actor, for the BBC’s Responsible Child, which bodes well for a character who has to be charming and unsettling in the same scene.
Lenny Rush taking Dobby is the more interesting signal. Dobby is built almost entirely on voice and physical performance rather than a face the audience recognises, and casting a real performance rather than a visual-effects showpiece suggests the show knows which parts of the book carry weight.
Bonnie Hill steps into a role that only grows from here. Ginny becomes one of the most important characters in the saga by Half-Blood Prince, so this recast was never about filling a Season 2 credit.
What this closes
For anyone who followed the recast scramble, this is the resolution: the July casting call worked and production does not appear to have lost meaningful time. For everyone else, it is a reminder that a season-per-book adaptation means even the film series’ “minor” characters are about to get full arcs.
Our living HBO series tracker has the complete confirmed cast list for both seasons.
Worth saying out loud, since it is easy to miss under the casting news: Dobby’s entire function in the second book is to be wrong in the most sincere possible way. He spends the story trying to save Harry’s life by ruining it. Whoever writes that balance for television has a harder job than whoever plays him.