Casting mis-steps

[Carol]

<bgrugin@> wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, who is that black kid?  He even has lines!  I didn't  remember him from before
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> Well, they say (Carol does, anyway, she even knows his name :-)) that this kid won some kind of essay competition where the winner is given a small part in the movie. I think it was really unfair to invent a new character for someone with a lot to say, when the established characters are not given enough material to play. Dean, for example, didn't have one single line to say in PoA, and he is a permanent book/movie character. 

Carol responds:

I'm just going by what I found on the IMDb. The kid's name is Ekow Quartey and he's credited as "Boy 1." Why they would give an unimportant, unnamed character lines that make him seem more knowledgeable than known characters like Seamus Finnegan (who asks what a Grim is--something that Book!Seamus would certainly know) is beyond me. 

I must have found the info about the essay contest in the IMDb message boards, but I don't have time to go back through them now, especially since most of the posters are adolescents who use texting abbreviations. Wonder if any of them can actually spell "two" (or distinguish it from "to" and "too").
 
> > bgrugin wrote:
> 
> > At first I thought he was Dean, but that's someone else, isn't it? 
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> Of course it's not Dean. Dean is the one who is tall and good-looking :-). Here is his last picture (from HBP), standing together with Ginny and Luna on board Hogwarts Express:
> 
> http://storeimgs.com/show.php/34599_harrypottercelebutopia12.jpg.html
> 
> 
> Love Arnold on Ginny's shoulder :-).
>
Carol:
Dean is standing in the shadows in the photo. If you hadn't told me he was there, I'd never have seen him! But Dean (Alfie Enoch) has lines in most or all of the films, and he's one of Harry's roommates, so he's pretty easy to spot in the films. IIRC, he's in the PoA scene where the boys eat the candies that cause them to make animal sounds (but Harry accidentally eats a pepper imp instead and has steam blowing out of his ears). Oddly, I don't remember any of his lines.

Carol, who is no fan of Boy 1 and wishes that his lines had either been eliminated (especially the one about catching smoke in your bare hands) or assigned to named characters from the book