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Feuding children with more power than sense, an unpredictable old man who knows much more than he lets on, and an institution staffed by people with ulterior motives. Is it any surprise, then, that when it came to its highly anticipated TV adaptation of Harry Potter, HBO bosses opted for two of the brains behind Succession?
The company’s first official casting announcement for its “decade-long” Potter series put the wizarding world back in the spotlight this week. And imbued with the power to make or break the fandom’s dreams are the Succession alumni Francesca Gardiner, who serves as showrunner, and Mark Mylod, who will direct multiple episodes.
The Britons will also serve as executive producers alongside JK Rowling, who interviewed them and praised their “genuine passion” for the books. “Having read Francesca’s pilot script and heard Mark’s vision, I’m certain the TV show will more than live up to expectations,” the author said after a four-month selection process. But what is known of the pair who have been handed the keys to Hogwarts?
Mylod was born in the English hamlet of Newton Abbot, in the south-west, in 1965 (his mother was a factory worker, his father a police officer), and dropped out of school at 17 to seek success in London theatre. “I had no qualifications,” he told the LA Times. “I never wanted to be an actor, but I did have fantasies of being a director.”
The fantasy came true, and Mylod’s trajectory over a career spanning three decades has been huge, ranging from low-budget British comedies to what will probably be one of the most high-budget shows in television history (at a cost of more than $200m a season).
His career began as a scene changer at Theatre Royal Haymarket and, later, a production assistant at the BBC. His early directing work included quintessential British shows such as the BBC comedy panel game Shooting Stars and the Royle Family, a sitcom about the lives of a television-fixated Manchester family, which earned him two Bafta TV awards.
But it was Mylod’s work on the pilot of the original UK version of Shameless in 2004 that caught HBO’s attention. Also set in Manchester, on the fictional Chatsworth council estate, the show revolved around the dysfunctional Gallagher family and depicted English working-class life and culture.
An invitation by HBO to direct an instalment of Entourage led to Mylod directing 23 episodes and serving as an executive producer. It was a dual role he went on to perform on Showtime’s pilot of The Affair and its US version of Shameless. He also directed multiple episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones across several seasons.
When Succession came along, HBO teamed Mylod up with the creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong – a partnership that proved incredibly successful. Mylod directed episodes including This Is Not for Tears, All the Bells Say, and Connor’s Wedding. He won an Emmy and a Directors Guild of America award for his work on the series. “My collaboration with Mark is up there as one of the most fruitful and meaningful I’ve had in my career,” Armstrong told the LA Times.
His other credits include the films Ali G Indahouse (2002), The Big White (2005), What’s Your Number? (2011), and The Menu (2022). And he directed episode 2 of the second season of HBO’s post-apocalyptic series The Last of Us, which premieres this weekend.
Mylod has spoken about his preference to “think about the bigger picture” when working on a show, including the arc of the characters, the arc of the story, and the overall tone. He has said his ambition on Succession was to “really try to peel back the layers on these apparently despicable characters” and “find that vulnerability, that inner child”.
Mylod has also said he doubts he will “ever have that kind of collaboration” that he had with Armstrong again. But if Potter is to work on the same level, he and Gardiner need to forge another one-of-a-kind partnership.
Like Mylod, Gardiner is another entrenched member of the HBO family. The writer, who has previously spoken of identifying with Hermione Granger and her “unappealing desire to be top of the class”, was born in 1983 and hails from a family of creatives. Her parents are the classical violinist Elizabeth Wilcock and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, an internationally renowned conductor (who pulled out of the BBC Proms after assaulting a male vocal soloist, before starting a new orchestra and choir).
Gardiner grew up on the 650-acre Gore Farm in rural Dorset before attending the Bryanston School, where she recalls weeping her way through Philip Pullman novels, and the London National Film and Television School, where she wrote her thesis on darkness in childhood stories.
In 2019, she was hired by Emerald Fennell as a “writer’s friend” on season 2 of the Emmy award-winning series Killing Eve, acting as a bridge between the scripting process and the actors. “[Gardiner] is an amazing communicator of tone and vision,” Sally Woodward Gentle, the founder of Sid Gentle Films, told Deadline. “She is a strong advocate for people around her … she’s aware of the human side of everything.”
Others who know Gardiner praised her collaborative spirit, evident during her time on Succession, which she joined in 2021 as consulting producer and writer, and on the HBO and BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials, where she served as executive producer and writer. Jack Thorne, lead writer on His Dark Materials, said she was “consistently fearless” about adapting Pullman’s books.
While little is known about the specifics of Gardiner’s vision (her writer’s room includes Killing Eve’s Laura Neal and Briarpatch’s Andy Greenwald), she has been vocal about her dislike of patronising children and sanitising horror. “She feels very strongly that she needs to honour the books”, Gentle told Deadline.
Whether we’ll get a scene of Dumbledore telling Harry and his gang that they are “not serious people” in the manner of Logan Roy is yet to be seen – but with Gardiner and Mylod at the helm, we can dream.
