**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE BOY WHO LIVED… DIED? HBO’s Harry Potter Recast Plagued by “Matrix Glitch” as Archival Footage Shows EXTINCT ACTRESS at Audition

LONDON – As HBO’s controversial reboot of the Harry Potter series trudges toward a third round of open casting calls, data analysts working on the production claim they have discovered a statistical impossibility buried in the casting files.

Sources confirm that the search for the new Hermione Granger has been thrown into chaos after analysts flagged a single frame hidden in the meta-data of a self-taped audition. The video file, submitted via an anonymous burner account, features a young girl—with the correct bushy hair and buck teeth—reading lines from Prisoner of Azkaban.

The glitch? The girl is identified in the internal database as ‘Marie LeStrange.’

According to publicly available genealogy records and a 1987 missing persons report, Marie LeStrange was a nine-year-old runaway in Cornwall who vanished without a trace in 1993. She is legally presumed dead.

“This is like finding a selfie of Anne Frank in the 2020s,” said a lead programmer who resigned from the project this morning. “The audio levels are perfect. The lighting is studio-grade. But the system says this file was generated on the exact day she disappeared. It’s a glitch in the matrix. Or someone is sending us a message.”

The bizarre coincidence deepens: The incoming kid’s name for the new Harry Potter, according to leaked studio memos, was originally Finnigan—until a junior producer discovered that the first name chosen for the new Ron Weasley was Ronald Bilius. The middle name “Bilius” was the exact middle name of the original book character.

“It’s like the data is