A Luna Lovegood Casting Rumor Is Spreading Before Back to Hogwarts Day
Something is always brewing before September 1st — and this year it’s a name. Young actress Ivy Jukes has become the center of speculation that she’s been cast as Luna Lovegood in HBO’s Harry Potter series.
Take this with the usual caveat: this is entirely unverified. HBO has announced nothing, no trade outlet has reported it, and there is no casting notice. Every piece of it originates with fan accounts reading signals from social media. We’re covering it because it has become one of the loudest conversations in the fandom this week — not because it’s confirmed.
Where the Rumor Started
The name came from @sirwizardingworld, a Harry Potter news account that first floated Jukes on August 5 — for Ginny Weasley, not Luna. His reasoning: she had appeared in an advertisement for the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London, meaning prior professional work on an official Warner Bros. production, and she follows a number of already-cast actors. He was candid even then that follow lists “should never be treated as concrete casting evidence.”
Commenters pushed back immediately, saying she read as Luna rather than Ginny. Three weeks later, he posted again — this time arguing for Luna.
The Case, Such As It Is
The new trigger was that Jukes reshared the official Harry Potter Back to Hogwarts countdown. In the video, Sir Wizarding World argues this is a step up from the follow-list material he cited in August — he draws a distinction between that and what he calls something more concrete. His reasoning is that official campaign material of this kind tends to be circulated by people connected to the production, whether they are announced cast or still unannounced, so a young actress resharing it is worth noticing.
He stops well short of calling it confirmation, opening the video by saying Luna may have been cast and framing the whole thing as speculation. But that inference is the case in full. There is no agent, no casting notice, and nobody on the production — it rests on a public post that a great many fans shared too. A commenter under one of his own Ginny posts made the point neatly, observing that he had shared the same Back to Hogwarts material himself, and asking whether that meant he was playing Arthur Weasley.
The more interesting part is the structural argument underneath it. Luna is in Ginny’s year at Hogwarts — she doesn’t formally enter the story until Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but she’s the same age. If HBO is casting Ginny for Season 2, it would be reasonable to cast Luna in the same window and seed her as a background student long before her proper introduction. That’s a genuinely plausible production approach for a decade-long adaptation, and it’s the part of this worth paying attention to regardless of who ends up in the role.
The Official Post Everyone Is Reading Differently
The Brazilian version of the story leans on one thing the earlier posts did not: the official Harry Potter Instagram account. On August 23, it posted a mocked-up message screenshot from a contact saved as “Luna,” asking whether the recipient is free on September 1st, with a reply about checking the calendar. The caption was a shrug about being busy that day. We checked, and the post is real — it has drawn more than 94,000 likes.
Here is the problem with treating it as a Luna Lovegood casting clue: almost nobody in that comment section read it that way. The overwhelming response was that it teases a trailer for the Back to Hogwarts showcase, which Warner Bros. is streaming on YouTube and TikTok on September 1st. The most-liked reply says exactly that. So does Sir Wizarding World, who turned up in the comments to ask whether it meant trailer drop day — the same person whose posts are the origin of the Ivy Jukes rumor.
A contact named Luna in Back to Hogwarts marketing is, at minimum, as easily a wink at a much-loved character as it is a hint about who has been cast to play her. One official post is now doing duty as evidence for two different conclusions, depending on who is holding it up.
How a Rumor Travels
This is where it gets instructive. On Friday, Brazilian creator @cacocardassi — 468,000 followers — posted the claim to an audience roughly forty-six times larger, with a caption stating flatly that Luna Lovegood will be cast in Season 2. No hedge, no question mark. His video is closing on 10,000 likes; the Sir Wizarding World reel it came from sits at roughly 490.
In the comments, Sir Wizarding World replied: “Que bom que você embarcou no meu rumor” — “Glad you got on board with my rumor.”
That’s the full lifecycle in three weeks. A hunch about one role becomes a hunch about a different role, then becomes a statement of fact in front of half a million people, while the underlying evidence never changes: an old commercial credit, a follow list, and a repost of marketing material that thousands of fans also shared.
None of which means it’s wrong. Fan accounts have occasionally been ahead of official announcements. But there’s a real difference between a rumor that turns out to be true and a rumor that was ever actually sourced, and this one is firmly the second kind until HBO says otherwise.
Do you think we’ll get a casting announcement on September 1st? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to follow along for more Harry Potter news.
