Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Part 1 offered a lot of surprises. One Hermione-related twist had the audience gasping in shock.
SPOILER ALERT FOR HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD.
First thing’s first: Keep the secrets.
Just a few hours after the first performance, it’s already becoming apparent that Cursed Child spoilers are unavoidable. We understand some fans want to know a bit about what happened (hence this article, which reveals a minor plot twist), but we urge you to keep your discussions to closed groups. Lots of Harry Potter fans want to find this stuff out on their own.
That said: Several Hypable staffers attended the first preview performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Part 1 on Thursday night in London. It’s really unfair to share too many opinions before we’ve seen Part 2, but what we can do is give a few teasers of how the world looks 19-ish years later.
While the show offered plenty of twists, there was one particular reveal quite early on which had the audience gasping and cheering, and it had to do with one Mrs. Hermione Granger.
You see, Hermione Granger is now the Minister for Magic.
That’s right. Our bossy little know-it-all who saved Harry’s hide more times than we can count now runs the Ministry of Magic!
And she really is our Hermione. Noma Dumezweni, one of the standout performers of Cursed Child, is a perfect mix of the girl we remember from the books, and the mature, commanding, and awe-inspiring adult who essentially holds the fate of the Wizarding World in her hands.
Before Cursed Child, all we knew about Hermione’s post-Hogwarts career was that she was “pretty high up” in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Clearly, that was putting it mildly!
The last known Minister for Magic was Kingsley Shacklebolt, who took over the post from Voldemort’s puppet Pius Thicknesse after the Battle of Hogwarts. We don’t know what happened to Shacklebolt, but 20 years after the war, it’s not unexpected that he’d have left the post in one way or another, giving way to a new commander-in-chief. And we couldn’t think of anyone better qualified than Hermione.
We could not be more proud of her — and of Dumezweni, too, whose performance eradicates any possible doubt that she should somehow not be the right actress for the job.
Related: Here are the Hogwarts Houses Albus, Scorpius, and Rose join in The Cursed Child
Dumezweni’s Hermione is assertive, vulnerable, intelligent, witty and brave — exactly as J.K. Rowling described her in the books. Her quiet confidence oozes into everything she does, as the character navigates the struggles of both her personal and professional life. She is, to put it plainly, the perfect Hermione.
Without going into any plot details, the fact that Hermione Granger, a Muggle-Born (who kept her own Muggle surname to boot), has risen to become Minister for Magic at the relatively young age of late-30s says a lot about the Wizarding World post-Voldemort.
In the theater, the reveal elicited one of the biggest collective gasps of the night (and there were quite a few).