Peter: I think you’re completely right, which is what great debates are built out of, innit, two people definitely agreeing on things. Fry has the human moments down, but Dale wins the magical and comical moments, which are what I love most about Harry Potter. Fry totally nails the scenes between Harry and Sirius in Azkaban.īut ultimately, I think Dale takes more risks with higher payoff. He could be a grandpa reading you to sleep (or a Peter!), and I think he packs more empathy. But Fry is more nuanced, realistic, and familiar. His Hermione is more shrill, Draco more cartoonishly evil, Trelawney more spooky and ditzy, McGonagle more stern, Hagrid more bumbling, etc. Right? Dale is more of a character actor / “voice artist,” with more over-the-top exaggeration. Rachel: I am with you on that, and the comparison that kept running through my head was Christopher Nolan’s Batman versus Tim Burton’s Batman. This is also invaluable as the books themselves get longer and deeper and darker. Partially, it’s because he has a deeper voice and a sense of how to slow down and lend an ominous quality to certain passages. For one thing, I think he has a gravitas about his reading. Peter: I’m willing to call Stephen Fry’s readings superior for various reasons. Rachel: I think I gotta stay with my boy Jim Dale, and I’m loving how in-it-to-win-it you are for Stephen Fry. Which horse are you putting your money on? (Or are you going for both? And how much longer can I sustain horse-racing metaphors, about which I know zilch?) I am prepared to go to the mat over this one.

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