#jack thorne

"An Almost Christmas Story" and "Kiff" are part of The 2026 Titmouse Inc. Sizzle Reel.

The way the interviewer didn’t even bring up sexuality but he did bc it came to mind.

Lox’s interview:

I have two main questions when it comes to The Cursed Child. The first is... why was this project made? Because it wasn’t for the money, and it wasn’t for the fans, so I have to assume it was for JK Rowling herself. And my second question is - who is Jack Thorne????

Because he wrote it. John Tiffany is a director who works with Thorne and it's based on a “story” by JKR. But Jack Thorne is a kinda highbrow, kinda indie English playwright, and he clearly wrote most if not all of it. The biggest thing he had done at the time was a stage adaptation of indie Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, so back 2016 I was asking myself - why is he attached to this project. (Is he related to JKR? Did he win a contest? Is he just that charming?) 

But now I’ve got a theory. See, Jack Thorne has one other very important credit. He is the showrunner and head writer of the well-regarded HBO His Dark Materials TV show adaptation… AND that TV show and Cursed Child were in production at the exact same time. There’s no real way of knowing which project came first - they were both announced in 2015, and Cursed Child was announced first, but then a stage play needs a whole lot less pre-production than three seasons of a prestige television show. 

What I think (but cannot prove) is this: JKR got wind of the His Dark Materials HBO TV series, and thought ‘I want one of those too.’ Especially because she is now in the process of getting exactly that.

I can’t actually prove that JKR is even aware of the His Dark Materials franchise… but I very much suspect that she is. Northern Lights/Golden Compass was released two years before Philosopher's Stone, and… a British author, YA , fantasy, seems like you’d want to read that for market research purposes alone - or at least keep tabs on it to make sure it was doing well. I also think there’s a similar vibe to the worldbuilding, a certain kind of ‘urban fantasy, but make it pre-industrial revolution’ that you don’t get with like, Edith Nesbit, the fantasy writer JKR most often credits as an influence.

Now His Dark Materials was a failed film series. They made one in 2007 with plans to make more, and it didn’t really go anywhere. I was a huge fan of both HDM and HP at the time, and I liked the film… but even then I thought it was hurting itself by trying so hard to be Harry Potter, when the tone of HDM was always darker and more sinister. It was nice to watch the HBO show treat the source material as basically a gritty adult drama (which it always was, just told through an intelligent child’s POV.) 

Marketing of movie vs marketing of TV show: 

Movie Lyra vs TV show Lyra:

HOWEVER. I think it would be very easy, if you were JKR, to see the new series as an adaptation of a children's book (comparable to Harry Potter), only marketed to adults. And you might think... that's kind of a cool idea. So I don’t know who approached who. But I do think that at some point Jack Thorne and J. K. Rowling were in the same room, and someone suggested… why don’t we give Harry Potter a little bit of the His Dark Materials treatment.

Because both vibe-wise and theme-wise, there are A LOT of comparisons you can make between the HBO His Dark Materials and The Cursed Child. They’re both fantasy with a kind of gloomy and oppressive feel. They focus a lot on bad parents, especially parents unable to communicate with their kids. They both feature alternate universes as a major theme, and the main plot of both revolves around a (doomed) attempt to resurrect a sacrificed innocent, and various adults attempting to separate a pair of friends. (The relationship between Albus and Scorpius is easily the best part of Cursed Child. Especially Scorpius, who is lovely.) But like… no one wanted a version of Harry Potter that felt like a knockoff version of His Dark Materials.

To me, Cursed Child feels less like an adaptation, and more of an attempt to recontextualize the original Harry Potter books into something more serious and more impressive. Cursed Child reframes Harry’s whole deal as being caught in a cycle of abuse due to the Dursleys… which the show frames so much more threateningly than the books ever did.

This play also does not frame Ron/Hermione as the best marriage... which makes me think of the when JKR told the Sunday Times

I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That's how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it... if I'm absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility.

And then Cursed Child gives us a little Hermione/Snape, and we know how JKR feels about Snape. We revisit a lot of Slytherin characters actually, and it turns out they’re not just bad guys! Albus is in Slytherin (even though the end of Book 7 was written in a way that REALLY heavily implied he would ask to be Gryffindor just like Harry did.) The ‘all Slytherins are baddies’ thing seems to be an aspect of the worldbuilding that JKR is attempting to retcon. The earliest example of this is the 2008 interview where she talks about “Slughorn galloping back with the Slytherins [to rejoin the battle of Hogwarts] but they’d gone off to get reinforcements first,” which… does not happen. That is not a thing that happens in the book. Slughorn comes back with reinforcements, but the Slytherin students spend the battle locked in the dungeon. JKR was was also okay with the last three Potter films framing Draco way more positively than the books do, a trend which continues into Cursed Child. Draco’s easily the best parent in the whole thing.)

And (possibly the most important bit of recontextualization…) I think Cursed Child was supposed to make the Epilogue seem good, instead of something that all her fans either made fun of… or completely ignored. 

In a lot of ways, I think JKR is doing a George Lucas, but instead of going back and re-cutting, re-mastering and adding to the original work the way he is - she’s writing more and more sequels (and more and more additional material) in an attempt to make  the problems of the earlier books go away.