Due to what can only be described as bad timing, Emma Thompson has been forced to choose between appearing in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows and a sequel to Nanny McPhee. Unfortunately for all of us Potter fans, she chose McPhee over Professor Trelawney.
Emma Thompson has done a great job of portraying Sybil Trelawney, the teacher of divination who prophesies the battle between Harry and Voldemort. But someone else will have to play her in the last two films of the series due to Thompson being busy on her own project.
She told MTV Movies:
“I’m making my own ‘Nanny McPhee’ next year. They mean much more to me. The working title is ‘Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang’. It’s not a sequel, actually, it’s a new story.”
“The Harry Potters are great big franchises that are something I’m not emotionally attached to or necessarily particularly creatively attached to. That’s more like doing a turn, whereas the Nanny McPhees are something I’ve written. The art is in those films, they’re very handmade, they’re something that’s very close to me. Those are the ones I really care about.”
I actually think that’s quite disrespectful to the Potter films. It’s as if she’s saying she only did them for the money whereas she cares about Nanny McPhee because she helped write it. It’s a shame then that the first Nanny McPhee movie was such a travesty of nature.
I wonder now whether they’ll recast Trelawney for The Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Part 2 or try and do without the character altogether. Either way, it seems a shame that Thompson couldn’t see the set of films through to the end.
