Jenny Jules On the Importance of a Black Hermione Granger

Actor Jenny Jules is Broadway’s new Hermione Granger—and her inner eight-year-old is blown away.

The show “Harry Potter And The Cursed Child” starts off where the books stopped, allows us to see what Harry Ron and, of course, Hermione’s lives are like as parents post-Hogwarts.

“She has everything that she wants,” Jules explained, alluding to her character’s adult life. “She’s the head of magic, she’s like the Minister for Magic, she’s in charge because she was the smartest girl in the wizarding world.”

Actress Noma Dumezweni played the role before Jules, and the fact that a woman of color was cast in the role received plenty of praise, even from J.K. Rowling herself.

“I see little eight-year-old girls in the audience going ‘I could be Hermione,’” Jules explained. “You know, my eight-year-old self when I saw the show was going ‘Oh my goodness me, I’m Hermione Granger.’ How awesome is that?”

Jules joked that if her 15-year-old self knew one day that she would be in a Broadway version of the famed “Harry Potter” series, she would “say a very oud profanity.”

“There aren’t enough words or the word hasn’t been invented yet for me to be able to express how I feel about doing this job,” she said. “It’s immense and I’m profoundly changed.”

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