Ben Barnes is pleasantly aware that he is the internet’s No. 1 choice to play Sirius Black in the Harry Potter reboot.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of Harry Potter books I’ve signed or Gryffindor scarves I’ve been given as gifts,” Barnes told Us Weekly while promoting his debut album, Where the Light Gets In. “The amount of fan fiction that I’ve been drafted into very enthusiastically is incredible.”
Fancasts, in which online fan communities select actors they hope to see portray their favorite book characters onscreen, aren’t a new phenomenon. However, such buzz doesn’t typically last for decades as it has for Barnes. It’s become so prevalent that one of the top suggestions that comes up when entering his name into Google is “Who does Ben Barnes play in Harry Potter?”
“It’s been going on for 20 years that people have been very kindly saying that they would’ve liked me to have played a young version of the Sirius Black character in Harry Potter, but now it’s been going on so long that I’m now the age of the actual character in the books,” the actor, now 43, said.
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Many Harry Potter fans have long requested a spinoff following the Marauders, Harry’s parents and their friends as students at Hogwarts. In the mid-2000s, Barnes was the popular choice for a young Sirius, often alongside Andrew Garfield as Remus Lupin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as James Potter. When Potterheads started asking him to sign their Gryffindor paraphernalia, he thought they were confusing franchises. After all, he did play Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia films.
“Now I understand that it was this group of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Andrew Garfield and myself that they were just very keen to be these characters when they kind of came out,” Barnes shared, noting that he’s a “massive” fan of Gary Oldman, who actually played Sirius Black in the films, and enjoyed the books.
The casting rumors haven’t come up with Garfield (who recently told reporters he’d “consider any role offered” in HBO’s Harry Potter reboot) or Taylor-Johnson. “I have kind of gotten to know both of them over the years a little bit, but never managed to talk to them about this,” he told Us.
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He also hasn’t spoken to Warner Bros. yet about potentially playing Sirius, but Barnes said he’s certainly open to playing the role when the upcoming TV show starts adapting Prisoner of Azkaban. “They’re books that I love and at least half of my career has been based on literary adaptations that I’ve loved,” he noted. “And that one, I see no reason why it would be any different, but I haven’t spoken to anyone about it yet.”
Barnes certainly doesn’t mind the enthusiasm fans have, explaining, “I find it very flattering, but it is quite weird to be kind of lauded for something that you never did.”
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Many of the fans who are pulling for him to play Sirius are also filling music venues as Barnes tours with his debut album, which dropped earlier this month. The Shadow & Bone alum, who is finishing the U.S. leg of his headlining tour, admitted that moving from saying other people’s words to singing his own was intimidating.
“I think a lot of actors are actors because they like to tell other people’s stories and become someone else for a period of time, and they can, if not hide behind, certainly investigate life and look at it through the lens of someone else,” Barnes said. “With music, there’s not really any hiding. It’s you on the stage. It’s you singing things that you’ve written about your life. To have people come and support that, and I found the music community very loving and supportive in that way. They’re like, ‘Yes, I’ll come and play on that. Yes, I’ll sing that song with you.’ … It’s really rewarding.”
That wasn’t his only encouragement. After releasing his first few songs, Barnes saw fans following his lead and doing what they love.
“Watching people do covers of it or dance in their kitchen to it or do little reels of them hugging their best mates to the songs or pole dancing or whatever it is that they were doing to the songs — an awful lot of pole dancing, I dunno where that comes from — but it was just so great to see people kind of taking the cue from me,” Barnes told Us. “If I can do pop music as a man in his 40s, then people can do the thing that they want to do. And I talk about that in the shows a little bit, but watching people do it in real time and really pick up that mantle and just get out and do the things that they love to the soundtrack that I made was incredibly rewarding.”
Barnes plays New York City on Saturday, February 1, in New York City before heading to the U.K. and Europe. Tickets are available here.
