Harry Potter was the most advantaged student -with Hermione Granger’s permission- of his Hogwarts class. But are there good professional opportunities for a young magician no matter how brilliant his record is?
There are, because a newly graduated wizard can find employment in a large company like J.W. Wells
“During the development of The Magic Door we were very aware that Potter was left as a teenager and we wondered what would happen to him after he graduated, if he would go to university and what his job would be as an adult. So we thought it was fun to continue along this path and ask what would have happened, but with another character, Paul, played by Patrick Gibson”, explains Blanca Lista, producer of The Magic Door in an interview with La Vanguardia.
Although the film and Paul follow in the footsteps of the famous Potter, Carpenter has his own literary saga. A saga that dates back to the early 2000s and is made up of seven books from the pen of Tom Holt, a famous and prolific British writer of youth literature. Lista notes that Holt’s novels “are very, very English and that was central to our story, which is drenched in English humour.”
However, the producer of The Magic Door, The Jim Henson Company, is American and the film was shot entirely in Australia during the time of the coronavirus pandemic: “Once Paul gets the job, he enters another world, where everything the characters have a magical touch and dress in a special way. To recreate that universe we build specific sets. But the film also has exterior footage that takes place in London, which we rendered as realistic as possible thanks to very specific locations combined with state-of-the-art visual effects.”
In that magical world of work, Paul meets Sophie, played by actress Sophie Wilde, a somewhat serious girl with extraordinary powers. A spark arises between the young people, but before launching into romance they will have to overcome a series of traps set by the bad guys of the film, Sam Neill and Christoph Waltz.
Blanca Lista boasts about the casting of La puerta mágica, which hits Spanish screens today, because it features Gibson that “I loved since I saw him in a Netflix series called OA. She was convinced that he was American, because he had an American accent and when I found out that he was Irish, I understood that he was perfect for the role of Paul ”.
The producers wanted a “new face” for the role of Shopie and signed Wilde, while for the roles of company executives the Harry Potter saga was once again a reference, “since it always had great stars of British cinema , so we called Waltz and Neill, who immediately said yes.”
