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« on: October 25, 2025, 03:46:10 AM » |
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Listen to the new Harry Potter audiobook — and meet its all-star cast
Move over, Stephen Fry: 26 years after his classic recordings, Audible is releasing a high-tech dramatisation of JK Rowling’s boy wizard series. Can it work the same magic?
Frankie Treadaway was recording his final lines as the voice of Harry Potter for a new generation when he fell ill. “On my last day of recording I was very ill,” he recalls. He tried to soldier on, but “luckily” the director sent him home from the sound booth. “I ended up spending two days in hospital to get my appendix removed.”
The new series promises to be a different beast with ambitions that go far beyond a simple reboot. Audible’s sound designers have used all the latest wizardry to give listeners a sonic adventure on a cinematic scale. It’s not so much an audiobook as a kind of “ear movie”. The composer Nitin Sawhney has recorded an original score with a 60-piece orchestra. But will all this prove more popular than the single voice of Fry?
Two years in the making, the recordings feature an ensemble of 200 performers with serious A-list clout: the audiobook is no longer the poor relation of the Hollywood franchise. There’s Hugh Laurie as Albus Dumbledore, Matthew Macfadyen as Lord Voldemort, Riz Ahmed as Professor Snape, Keira Knightley as Professor Umbridge, Leo Woodall as Bill Weasley, James McAvoy as Mad-Eye Moody and more. Eleven-year-old Arabella Stanton, the former West End Matilda who is playing Hermione, is one of the few performers who will also appear in the upcoming HBO version, again as Hermione.
Kit Harington, the 38-year-old Game of Thrones actor, plays Professor Lockhart, the vain, swaggering charlatan immortalised on screen by Kenneth Branagh. “He’s such an arse,” Harington tells me. “For all of his sins I quite like him. He’s that type of guy, a bit like Alan Partridge. We can all name them, or we know who they are — those people who can’t quite see [themselves].”
A bit Prince Andrew? “I think Lockhart is about a million times more likeable than Prince Andrew,” Harington says, laughing. Perhaps the greatest challenge for any Harry Potter adaptation is that after eight films the audience has a fixed idea of what the characters look and sound like.
Was Harington daunted by filling Branagh’s shoes? “I don’t feel as if I’m filling Branagh’s shoes. I feel as if I’m following in Fry’s shoes because that’s the audiobook that I’ve listened to every single night. Branagh’s Lockhart was a very suave guy. Fry went for a more bombastic style. I went for vain narcissist with the biggest performance I could manage because I think this deserves it.”
The series was recorded near the Barbican in central London. No one spent longer behind the microphone than the narrator, Cush Jumbo. “It takes me back to being in the Nativity in primary school, when you were the narrator because you hadn’t been good enough to be Mary,” she tells me. Not so on this occasion. The three-time Olivier award-nominated star of The Good Wife and The Good Fight has arguably the most important role as the listeners’ guide.
“You have to become their friend and a likeable person very quickly. You can’t be annoying,” Jumbo says. “Fry was amazing. He felt like your mate, your really intelligent mate.” Overdo it and you risk clashing with the other actors and the sound effects: “It just becomes a big mess of sound.” But go the other way and you might bore people to sleep. “You don’t want to be just: ‘Please mind the gap. See it, say it, sort it,’” she adds, with an eyeroll. “You don’t want to be forgettable, but nor do you want to be taking away from a wand fight.”
Jumbo, 40, has already experimented with technology and storytelling, having played Lady Macbeth opposite David Tennant in a high-concept production at the Donmar Warehouse in 2023. The audience wore 3D “binaural” headphones with a haunting soundscape of unseen giggling children and cawing crows in one ear and the whispers of the conniving couple in the other.
She found listening to the new audiobooks for the first time similarly immersive. “When Harry first entered Diagon Alley it was really, really magical. It nearly brought me to tears. The way they can use the sound means you almost feel as if a brick is wiggling out of the wall in front of you.”
The sound designer Lawrence Kendrick, 39, remembers devouring the books before an audiobook version existed. “Back then, I’d smash through a book in a day. I would read into the night, set my alarm early and wake up to read it the next day. The story was so new, you didn’t know what was going to happen.” His family would take turns reading the novels aloud. “It’s a core memory,” he says.
Now Kendrick is reading them to his six-year-old daughter in between leading the sound design team on the biggest project of his career. Their first step, he explains, was to “disregard the films. It’s about the words on the page and that’s what matters.” Everything else was a combination of high-tech trickery and some surprisingly low-tech improvisation.
“We approached it like set design,” he says. “This isn’t a radio play where a sound just pops up.” Instead, the sound was recorded and mixed using Dolby Atmos, a technology that plays with the height and the direction of sound to draw the listener in deeper so they can hear and feel more. “It’s more like a 3D environment. You’ve almost got to be a little bit careful because it’s so intimate, like someone is whispering in your ear.”
Kendrick and his team spent a lot of time sound-hunting. Bringing the Hogwarts Express to life meant spending several days “hanging out the back of a steam train” to capture almost every possible sound made by the locomotive Squadron 303 as it chugged and hooted along the Spa Valley Railway in Tunbridge Wells in Kent.
A school in Leytonstone, east London, provided the background noise for Hogwarts: the team used “ambisonic mics” to capture sounds from every direction as the schoolchildren played. More ambient noise was recorded in the Forest of Dean, at the lake at Beckenham in south London and in Stratford-upon-Avon, “to get that cobbledy feeling from its old-timey streets”, he says.
Kendrick says that many of the effects are manipulated versions of familiar things because “the wizarding world isn’t sparkly or magical in that tinkly way, it’s based in reality”. For example, what sounds like a fantastical creature may actually “be the exhale of a horse, pitched down. A trick I love is slowing down birdsong, like a robin singing and slowing it by 95 per cent until it sounds like a haunting, underwater creature.”
The rattle of the Dementors was made by one of Kendrick’s team gargling egg whites. Bubbling potions and other fantastical sounds were recorded from a chemistry set. “You’re hearing things which are up in the ultrasonic frequency spectrum brought down to something we can hear. It’s a mix of something authentic and something slightly outside our world.”
He gives an example. “The first time you hear Fluffy the dog, and realise that this triple-headed beast is right there in front of you, and you can hear his slobber dripping on the floor and he’s breathing and [you can feel] the weight of him pushing down the floorboards … I think that will be such a new experience.” Kendrick hopes it’s also one that will endure. “When I’m 80 I hope it’s going to be the thing that stands the test of time,” he says.
There’s another big reason why this investment in audio is happening now. One complete collection of the Potter series comes in at 3,400 pages. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the longest novel, is 766 pages. When I ask the three lead actors how many of their friends have read the books, Max Lester, 13, who plays Ron Weasley, replies: “Zero.” Really? “Zero of my friends [have read the books] because … they are glued to their devices.” However, he adds: “They would put on their headphones and probably listen to an audiobook.”
Would your friends sit down with the books, I ask Treadaway, the audio Harry. “Unfortunately, it’s sad, but they probably wouldn’t. That’s the truth. People listen to music and with headphones on they would definitely listen to the audiobooks because it’s a different feeling. It’s you in your own little world.”
But in keeping with the spirit of Hermione, Arabella Stanton disagrees. “I think most of [my friends] would probably read the books. I think quite a few of them have already read the books.”
Stanton will be acting in the HBO series at the Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, Hertfordshire, over the next eight to ten years. She can’t say much about the new school that has been built near the set for the child actors, but confirms: “It’s all good. We obviously dip in and out of filming to go to school.”
What’s the best advice she has received on coping with the attention that being Hermione will bring? “It’s an amazing thing overall,” she says. “I think just enjoying the process is the main thing.”
For Jumbo the series is an invitation to fans to reimagine the Potterverse. “Our concentration spans have changed and I think children’s imagination has changed. Everything [in films] gets put in front of us — CGI is doing all the work. So [the audiobook] is a bit like going to the imagination gym.”
There’s also a comfort in returning to familiar stories, she adds. “I’m feeling that we all need a bit more magic in our lives. Who, right now, doesn’t want something to delve into that can give them half an hour of joy?”
Harry Potter: the full-cast editions are released by Audible on Nov 4
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