As opening night ended and the cast finished their bows, a photographer climbed one of the Hogwarts staircases while it slid on stage. The cast of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” all get into poses and hundreds of audience members turn on their phone flashlights.
“It’s like you’re swimming in stars,” Aidan Close said about the scene.
Close — an actor currently playing Scorpius Malfoy in the first North American Broadway tour of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and recent Boston University alum — has been described as a light to those around him, onstage and off. He got the phone call that he said changed his life last January and has been performing as Scorpius since the tour started in September.
“A great honor of my life is that my say and my weird choices and my essences are in that character that thousands of people are seeing every day,” Close said.
He said he is the first person to do a new dance sequence at the beginning of act two and explained how the cast gave input on new structural decisions in the show.
“I would like to say that I advocated for a sensitivity and earnestness and a groundedness for the character,” Close said. “This character is so fundamentally excitable and bombastic and dynamic, and I hope I’ve inspired a bit of the reverse.”
During his freshman year of college, Close said the realization that acting and theater were his passions “struck [him] like lightning.” Close graduated BU with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting in 2023.
“Then I cared about it a little too much, and I burned out,” Close said. “But I then evened myself out, and it’s been a love ever since, it’s been undeniable.”
Julianna Austin, who plays Polly Chapman and other ensemble characters, said Close was a “fascinating, high energy actor,” and they “fell in love with him immediately.”
Austin said early on in the rehearsal process, Close kept catching their eye.
“The human eye is drawn to movement,” Austin said. “And no matter what I was working on or what I was doing or looking at, Aiden was always jumping up and down whenever he got a new discovery or something really cool happened.”
But Close’s enthusiasm was not restricted to his own character development. Austin said he was “equally as enthusiastic about everyone else’s wins and everyone’s discoveries and success as he is about his own.”
Fellow cast member Zach Norton, who plays Karl Jenkins and Viktor Krum in the show, said there is a constant, “absolutely electric” energy to Close.
“That kid can jump like no one else I’ve ever seen,” Norton said. “If you see him with two feet on the ground, that’s an odd sighting.”
Norton said what is special about Close is he does not keep all his energy and passion to himself, and it “bleed[s] into everyone else’s performances and everyone else’s day.”
Whether they share a smile, a joke, a hand on the shoulder or a hug, Norton said he and Close always check in with each other to see how the other is doing, and he always feels better afterwards.
Close’s passion for art and storytelling seeps into another aspect of his life: a weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons, a group role-playing game without a script, where Close is the game master.
“You can see his values and his expressions and his mastery of creating and living in a world through the fantasy veil,” Austin said. “Funny enough, I’ve gotten to know him and all of our people playing at the table so well through our creation of a world and creation of a story.”
Austin said people love Close for being “excitedly compassionate,” and how he loves people back with “such joy and abandon that makes everybody else feel really good.”
“There’s an energy that exists between people that if someone laughs, it’s easier for the other person to laugh,” Close said. “And being in community you’re allowed to feel things that you don’t normally feel, and so I believe in a little bit of magic.”
