The Wizarding World is one of the most popular IPs of all time, largely thanks to the Harry Potter movies. That franchise, which is streaming with a HBO Max subscription, is full of outstanding talent, including Domhnall Gleeson. He played Bill Weasley in the last two movies, but recently revealed that his first day on the set was a total disaster. He's definitely got a good story.
The Harry Potter cast featured a number of names that would be bound for greatness, including Gleeson. While appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the 42 year-old actor spoke about his rocky start to joining the behemoth property. In his words:
My first day on that set, I was meant to be doing an English accent. They’d all been doing it — I was in the seventh and eighth movies, only a small part. And I went Australian. And I couldn’t stop.
Oops. From a phonetic standpoint, there are some similarities between these two accents. I can't imagine Gleeson is the first actor to accidentally slip into the wrong one. But he was doing this on the set of a wildly expensive franchise... in front of a ton of his fellow actors. I'm not going to lie, this kind of sounds like a stress dream.
The Star Wars alum went on to tell Seth Meyers that his accent flub on Harry Potter only got more humiliating from them. Not only did the cast notice, but he also got a note from the director about just how wrong his accent work was. As Gleeson shared:
I went Australian on the first take and there was like 300 people on set and the director was there like, ‘Cut!’ And this weird, long pause. And then the director came over and he was like, ‘So you’ve gone Australian.’
Whoops. This certainly doesn't sound like the first impression you want to make as an actor... let alone the stakes involved with a franchise like Harry Potter. I will say that I re-watched his scenes in the seventh and eighth movies and couldn't tell. So clearly Gleeson was able to land the plane eventually.
Domhnall Gleeson shared this story on Late Night while promoting his new show The Paper, which is available with a Peacock subscription. While lamenting about just how horrible that first day in the Wizarding World was, he connected the two project by joking:
It was shocking. It was one of the worst days of my life. And then things got a little bit better. And so I hope my American accent in this [The Paper] is better, but you tell me!
Soon enough we'll be introduced to a new version of Bill Weasley, thanks to the developing Harry Potter TV show. The upcoming book to screen adaptation is expected to be more accurate to the books, thanks to having way more hours of storytelling available. As such, maybe we'll get much more of the eldest Weasley child compared to the limited screen time of Gleeson in the films.
The Harry Potter franchise is streaming in its entirety on HBO Max, which will also be the home of the TV version. The Paper's first episode is streaming now on Peacock as part of the 2025 TV schedule, and the Office spinoff has already been renewed for Season 2.
