“Harry Potter” HBO series enlists “Game of Thrones”, “Succession” alums as director and showrunner

Francesca Gardiner will be showrunner and lead writer on the new adaptation, while Mark Mylod will direct several episodes.

Some of HBO's top talent is assembling at Hogwarts. The network announced on Wednesday that two of its top creatives from recent blockbuster shows will be working on the upcoming Harry Potter series.

Related: Succession director Mark Mylod teared up while shooting Sunday's shocking episode

Mark Mylod, who directed several of the biggest episodes of Succession and worked on Game of Thrones before that (as well as 2022's black comedy film The Menu), is on board as an executive producer and will direct multiple episodes. Francesca Gardiner, another Succession veteran who also wrote on HBO's His Dark Materials adaptation, will be showrunner and lead writer of the new Potter series.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Deadline reported in February that Gardiner was one of three finalists for the showrunner position, all of whom were tasked with pitching "their take on the IP." Apparently, Gardiner's interpretation won out.

As previously announced, the series will not tell a new story. Rather, it will be a new, "faithful adaptation" of J.K. Rowling's seven original Harry Potter novels with an all-new cast. Rowling's books (centered around a young wizard student who is destined to defeat the Dark Lord Voldemort) only got thicker as they went on, making them progressively harder to translate into two-hour movies. The TV format should allow producers to fit even more of Rowling's "fantastic detail" onscreen.

Given that approach, fans shouldn't expect to see original Harry Potter stars show up in the new series, except perhaps in small cameo roles, and even that seems unlikely. Daniel Radcliffe, who played the Boy Who Lived across eight movies in the 2000s, recently commented that "I don't know if it would work to have us do anything in it" and that he's "very happy to just watch along with everyone else."

Related: Daniel Radcliffe wins his first Tony as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Merrily We Roll Along

In an earnings call earlier this year, Warner Bros Discovery chief David Zaslav said the show was aiming for a 2026 premiere date. Although Rowling is not as closely involved in the series as she was with the recent Fantastic Beasts movies (all three of which she wrote or co-wrote), she met with Zaslav and HBO chief Casey Bloys in London earlier this year to discuss the project.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.