How old is the disgruntled Hogwarts Potion master Severus Snape? Go on, guess.
He’s in his thirties. He was in school with Harry Potter’s parents, who – in a world where almost everyone marries their childhood sweetheart, it seems – had him at 20; he was in the same year as Remus Lupin, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew. In the land of film, where actors do often play different ages, it’s nevertheless notable that a character who ages from 31 to 38 over the course of the series was played by an Alan Rickman in his mid-fifties and mid-sixties.
The other actors aren’t exactly spring chickens either – David Thewlis (Lupin), Gary Oldman (Black) and Timothy Spall (Wormtail) are all in their fifties now. Except that Lupin is supposed to look older than he is, and shabby; as a werewolf he’s found it difficult to find work and the monthly transformations take their toll. Black has spent 13 years in the wizard prison, Azkaban, for a crime he didn’t commit, while Pettigrew has lived first as a rat and then in hiding as Voldemort’s loyal aide. They can be forgiven for looking, as we say in this country, “a bit shook”.
But then there’s Severus Snape, who aside from youthful involvement with the Death Eaters (all of whom age remarkably well – see Jason Isaacs as a sleek Lucius Malfoy, who is several years older than Snape, or Helena Bonham-Carter as the gloriously demented Bellatrix Lestrange), has spent all his adult life within the walls of Hogwarts, the safest place in all of wizarding Britain. He has no reason to look as old (or indeed as handsome) as the now sadly late Alan Rickman, and as viewers we have no reason to accept him, except for what in fannish circles is described as the “Rule of Cool”. TVTropes.org (a fannish resource rivalling academia in terms of its obsessive cataloguing and analysis) explains it thusly: “the limit of the willing suspension of disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to the element’s awesomeness”.
So never mind that Snape’s hair is “greasy black” and his nose “hooked”, with eyes that are “cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone); never mind that he has “a stringy, pallid look about him, like a plant kept in the dark” (Order of the Phoenix) or should look like an “overgrown bat” at all times (Half-Blood Prince).
Rickman’s Severus Snape is not the reader’s, and it goes beyond an inevitable tendency to make the film incarnations of book characters more attractive. Rickman’s Snape is glamorous where the reader’s is petty and ugly. When he duels with Gilderoy Lockhart (a tongue-in-cheek performance from Kenneth Branagh) in the second instalment of the franchise, we never hope (as the protagonists do in the novel) that the two might finish each other off and be done with it; we desperately want Snape (who is somehow ours, already) to show up this charming, superficial newcomer.
When the more sympathetic Lupin transforms into a werewolf and threatens the trio of Harry, Hermione, and Ron, Rickman’s Snape shields them. The ongoing insults that drip from Snape’s mouth in the book are either absent in the film adaptations or somehow more believable. Rickman’s Snape is dignified. He is justified. Even when he engages in mild corporal punishment (Goblet of Fire film), it is elegant: witnessing Harry and Ron continuing to discuss their lack of dates for the Yule Ball rather than do their homework in silence, he rolls his eyes, tugs on his sleeves, and presses their heads towards the desk. It is funny, rather than cruel; unlike a narrative mediated through Harry’s eyes, we are on Snape’s side here.
But in the film universe we are on Snape’s side more often than any other adult we see, even the sympathetic teachers, even Dumbledore, who perhaps suffers from a change in actor after Richard Harris’s death. From his first speech in the Potions classroom, with Rickman intoning, “I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses” in that velvety voice, there is a charisma there that ensures that we never really fear or mistrust Snape in the way the trio do. And when he is up against the greatest villain of the series – the sickly-sweet Dolores Umbridge, whose belief that she is doing good and protecting the children, regardless of the cost, make her more compelling than the downright-evil Voldemort – even Ron Weasley is amused at Snape’s deadpan responses to her questions.
In the final movie the truth comes out: Snape is one of the good guys, and has been for years. In a sequence of flashbacks, we discover the truth about his background and his great love for Harry’s mother – which, we see in the book, is more complicated than a case of unrequited adoration but a friendship slowly destroyed by Snape’s own ties to the Dark Arts and a tendency towards anti-Muggle slurs. On screen, though, it is pure: after seven instalments of keeping his cool, Snape’s emotions break through and we see why an actor of great range was needed for this role. A sobbing Snape cradling the body of his dead childhood friend, his lost love, moves us. A desperate Snape furious with Dumbledore for letting this happen, as he sees it, and reconciling himself a lifetime of secrecy, moves us.
The comparable chapter in the final book offers up similar scenes but without that raw emotion Rickman brings to the screen, and by that stage we have seen so much petty bullying that Snape can only ever be pathetic rather than heroic. So when readers ask Rowling, as they do, why on earth Harry named his son after Snape, a man who was abusive to all around him, it is understandable. “Snape is all grey,” Rowling tweeted in November 2015. “You can’t make him a saint: he was vindictive & bullying. You can’t make him a devil: he died to save the wizarding world.”
This echoes her comments from an interview after the publication of the final novel in 2007 where she described Snape as “a very flawed hero. An anti-hero, perhaps. He is not a particularly likeable man in many ways. He remains rather cruel, a bully, riddled with bitterness and insecurity – and yet he loved, and showed loyalty to that love, and ultimately, laid down his life because of it. That’s pretty heroic.”
And yet it is difficult to fully buy into this version of Snape unless we watch the movies. Unless we see this anti-hero brought to life by a fine actor whose very presence in a film demands that his character be taken seriously (see also his Metatron in Dogma, or Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest). Rickman’s Snape charms us, intrigues us, and by the end of the series breaks our hearts. In fan parodies and other fan works, such as the Potter Puppet Pals YouTube series, he is sometimes funny, sometimes sexy, but rarely the “greasy git” or “overgrown bat” of the novels. More so than any other character who appears throughout the entire series, Snape is brought to life and made empathetic by the film adaptations and an actor bringing theatrical training and expertise to a franchise that might otherwise been viewed as trivial or for children only. While the trio are still finding their feet as actors, Rickman is raising eyebrows and purring his lines, and by the time we reach that final tour-de-force montage we are firmly on Team Snape, whether we should be or not.
Claire Hennessy is a writer, editor and creative writing facilitator based in Dublin. Her next novel, Nothing Tastes As Good will be published by Hot Key Books in July
