Does anyone give less of a fuck than an old British Dame? At this point in her career, Miriam Margolyes has nothing left to prove, so she doesn’t have to kowtow to anyone, let alone adult Harry Potter fans, whom she professes to “worry” about. “They should be over that by now,” she says in an interview with New Zealand’s 1News. “You know, I mean, it was 25 years ago, and it’s for children. I think it’s for children. But they get stuck in it.”
As worrisome as Margolyes may find Potterheads’ arrested development, she is not above taking their money. “I do Cameos, and people say, ‘Oh, we’re having a Harry Potter-themed wedding,’ and I think, ‘Gosh, what’s their first night of fun going to be?’” She laments. “I can’t even think about it.”
Get them again, Dame Miriam! The actor, who played the Harry Potter films’ Herbology teacher Professor Sprout, has long felt the series “doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to them.” (Understatement.) “For me Harry Potter wasn’t important,” she said back in June 2023. “I was very glad I got the part and I enjoyed being in it and meeting all the people, but it’s not Charles Dickens.”
You can debate the quality of prose and relative cultural impact of J.K. Rowling vs Dickens in the comments if you want. But Margolyes has a point that touches at a larger cultural phenomenon, which is much of the entertainment for being made for adult audiences is repackaging what they liked as kids. From Marvel to DC to Star Wars to Harry Potter to Twilight to every live-action Disney remake, millennials are constantly being fed “new” versions of stories that were intended, in their original form, for a younger demographic. As Margolyes observes, many of us get “stuck” in nostalgia loops that keep us from evolving our taste in art and media, and the major entertainment companies are all too happy to keep the loop going in order to cash in.
It’s a bit of a troublesome trend, and although “Harry Potter is wonderful” and she’s “very grateful to it,” as she states on 1News, Margolyes has a very different perspective than the adults who grew up with the series and still make it a major part of their personalities. “It’s over. That’s what I think,” she says.