Aidan Close (Scorpius Malfoy) (left) on stage with Emmett Smith (Albus Potter). Photos by Matthew Murphy

Arts & Culture

BU Alum Stars in National Tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Meet Aidan Close (CFA’23), who’s playing Draco’s son Scorpius Malfoy

When Aidan Close first stepped into the audition room for the national tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, he had read only a handful of the J. K. Rowling books. He wasn’t quite sure what he might be getting himself into. He had his sights set on playing the role of Albus Potter, Harry’s son. But several auditions and callbacks later, he was cast as Scorpius Malfoy, the son of Draco Malfoy, Harry’s bully and an infamous troublemaker throughout the original book series and film adaptations.

For Close (CFA’23), pursuing acting at a professional level has always been his dream, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is his most significant credit to date.

“It just felt too good to be true,” he says during a morning off from performing in LA, draped in a Comfy blanket and sipping a cup of tea. “When you have the original director and the original creative team working with you to cut the script and mold this new version around you, it’s so special.”

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premiered in London in 2016 and moved to Broadway in 2018 (the Broadway production won six Tony Awards that same year, including Best Play). With more than $270 million in sales and 2.5 million tickets sold, it also holds the Guinness World Record for the highest grossing nonmusical play in Broadway history. The play was written by Jack Thorne, based on a story by Thorne, Harry Potter creator Rowling, and John Tiffany, who is directing the show. 

The production is a straight play (for non-theater folks, that means there’s only acting, not singing or dancing) that’s an epilogue to the original Harry Potter series. It starts as the iconic trio—Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger—send their teenage children off to Hogwarts. 

One of the play’s lead characters, Scorpius Malfoy, by some awesome twist of fate, is a good friend of Albus Potter’s (the friendship between Close and Emmett Smith, who plays Albus, is just as strong offstage as it is on). And despite the challenges Scorpius faces and the situations he winds up in, unlike his father, he’s mostly a good egg. 

“Scorpius is such a gift,” Close says. “He’s such a sweet, earnest, loving, special kid, and the thought that I even get to play him is a gift. I hope, despite all of my neurotics, that people still get that gift.” 

It seems to be working. In a review of the show, the LA Times theater critic wrote that Close was “truly funny and hugely enjoyable to watch.”

Cast in January 2024, Close and his colleagues had an extensive rehearsal process, from mid-July to mid-September, when they began previews at Chicago’s James M. Nederlander Theatre. After performing there through January 2025, the show began a run in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, in February. Once the LA performances conclude in mid-June, Close and the gang will head to Washington, D.C., then to Boston, where it’s scheduled for a six-week run at the Emerson Colonial Theatre beginning in November.

“I’m very excited [to get to perform in] this place where I started to learn how to be myself onstage, where I first learned my, quote-unquote, magic,” Close says.

Close graduated from BU’s College of Fine Arts with a BFA in acting and a concentration in musical theater. He says his four years on Commonwealth Avenue, although briefly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, were filled with invaluable experiences, both in and out of the classroom, including on-campus productions (perhaps most notably, a sitcom created by CFA and COM students) and a semester abroad, where he studied and performed with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the Prague Shakespeare Company.

“For an actor, Shakespeare is a really amazing Rosetta Stone for the work itself,” Close explains. “I was so lucky with the roles I played. I played Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing and Henry VI in King Henry VI, Part III [both with the Prague Shakespeare Company]—two substantial, bucket list roles where I was able to, in a way, try to pursue this simplicity and joy. I wouldn’t trade those things for the world.”

Although this international training was valuable, Close credits his professional success to the strong foundation he was able to build and the skills he learned at CFA. More than his undergraduate coursework, though, it was really the friends he made, he says, as well as the larger BU community, that allowed him to grow and improve both in his craft and in his everyday life outside of acting.

“I think what college does more than anything, at least in undergrad, is it will give you a few tricks and teach you some things that you can look back on,” he says. “It will technically change who you are, and it creates for some, at least for me, a more stable, joyous, dependable version of myself, not only in my work, but in myself.”

Although Close will be on tour for the rest of the calendar year, the not-so-distant future is somewhat uncertain. He figures it will be filled with more auditions and callbacks as he tries for another credit to add to his already impressive résumé, which he hopes will be an invaluable learning experience, just as his run with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been.

He is infectiously optimistic for what’s to come. “I’ve learned that I have no say in what I do [next], but I do hope that it continues to teach me the way that this role is teaching me,” he says.

Aidan Close will perform as Scorpius Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston from November 9 to December 20. Tickets are available for purchase here.