Interview: Larry Yando talks playing Dumbledore in HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD

A self-admitted “crazy person” for J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels who “stood in line at a bookstore whenever a new volume was released,” performer Larry Yando knows that portraying Dumbledore – onetime headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – in the play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is a high-profile piece of work.

After all, in the film series based on Rowling’s bestselling books, Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore has been played by well-known actors from Richard Harris and Michael Gambon to, in prequels, Jude Law and Toby Regbo, and will soon be played by John Lithgow in the upcoming HBO television adaptation.

Yando – who played Pangloss in The Goodman Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., co-production of Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of “Candide” at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in 2011 – is now sporting Dumbledore’s beard in the just-commenced second year of the North American tour of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which will be at Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre through December 20.

Written by Jack Thorne from a story by Thorne, Rowling, and John Tiffany, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” premiered in London’s West End in June 2016, going on to win nine Oliver Awards including Best Play. A still-running production at New York’s Lyric Theatre won six 2018 Tony Awards including Best Play, and is now the longest-running non-musical in Broadway history. Additional mountings of the show are currently running in Hamburg, Tokyo, and the Netherlands.

The time-travel drama – which Rowling has called “the eighth Harry Potter story” – takes place 19 years after the events of Rowling’s novel “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and picks up right where the last Harry Potter film left off. Almost two decades after Harry, Ron, and Hermione saved the wizarding world, they’re back on a new adventure – joined this time by a brave new generation that has only just arrived at the legendary Hogwarts.

When Harry Potter’s headstrong son Albus Severus Potter befriends the son of his fiercest rival, Draco Malfoy, it sparks a new journey with the potential to change the past and future forever.

A onetime Boston Conservatory student, Yando – who has earned acclaim for his villainous turns as Scar in “The Lion King,” Roy Cohn in “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” for 15 seasons at the Goodman – was at home in Chicago when he discussed Dumbledore and more by Zoom recently.

In addition to the novels, are you also a fan of the Harry Potter movies?

I have not seen the films, and I had never seen this play in London or on Broadway before I was cast for this tour.

Was that a conscious decision on your part?

No, no, no, it wasn’t. This all sort of happened out of the blue, so I didn’t have time to decide whether I should see the play, or go watch the movies quickly, or not, so I just didn’t. Now that I’m into the run, I see no good that could come from me watching the movies now. They’d just get in my head and maybe get in my way as I play my own version of Dumbledore.

Also, I rehearsed the show with one of its writers and its original director, John Tiffany, and that’s how I absorbed this story. It doesn’t get much better than that for a theater actor. So, when I mentioned the idea to John, he immediately said, “Don’t watch the movies or see another production now. Wait until this experience is over.” That was my instinct, too, and I was happy to take his advice.

Describe how Dumbledore is different in this play from other iterations?

What’s great about his appearance in this play is that things get said that were never said in any of the books, as far as I can remember.

How are you handling that as an actor?

I’m extrapolating and thinking that this or that might be the same in the films, but it wasn’t in the books. So, I’ve taken everything I ingested over the seven books and the years of my life that it took to read them, and sort of simmered all that in my head. I’m taking the idea of this benevolent, cranky, mischievous, dangerous wizard, and using all of that in one of my scenes that’s written as though it’s a sort of breakthrough for him.

What more can you share about that moment in this story?

I don’t want to say too much about what the scene is, but it’s a very important one with Dumbledore and Harry that’s quite beautiful and quite unexpected, in my opinion, because they say things that have long been pushed down. The scene plays like a pressure cooker. And it’s always very interesting, as an actor, not to let that top come off too readily. What’s going on between Harry and Dumbledore has been squeezed down for a very long time, in my view, and when the valve is released a little bit, it’s exciting. I feel like I get the chance to give Dumbledore a cathartic moment that he may not have had in any of the other previous incarnations.

Dumbledore is your main character, but you also get to play two other roles. Tell me about those parts?

One of the things I love about the play is that I also get to play Hogwarts Professor Severus Snape, a role originated in the movies by the late Alan Rickman. Snape is one of the wizards, and one of the teachers at the school, and you know through the books that he’s considered to be working with the Dementors, and doing all the evil, anti-Dumbledore things. He’s very mysterious, very shrouded, and dressed all in black with black hair. Excitement happens when Snape is around. He’s got about eight different things going on and his gears are always turning. You don’t want to take your eyes off him.

I also play Amos Diggory, the father of Cedric Diggory, who, fans will remember, was the boy killed early on in one of the Triwizard tournaments. Amos is a good guy. He’s in a wheelchair, and he becomes integral to the plot because he wants his son Cedric back so badly. That ratchets up the empathy for the character and instigates a lot of plot points involving Cedric’s death.

What has it been like creating your own versions of characters originated by other actors?

I never, ever felt one iota of pressure to do anything expected from past productions, on film, or from this show on Broadway during our rehearsal period. It felt like the world was my oyster when it came to developing my own versions of these characters.