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Strike or no strike, the show will go on for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and with that in mind, Warner Brothers has announced the final cast for the upcoming 6th adaptation in the Harry Potter series. Returning to the fight are all the old faces, Danial Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as the bewitching Harry, Ron and Hermione, along with Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Michael Gambon and Alan Rickman as their various teachers. The good guys aren’t the only ones returning of course, as Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Isaacs and Ralph Fiennes are back to take them down and take over the world for evil.

Of course, you can’t have a new movie with only the original cast, and so we come to the new faces. Firstly, there’s Narcissa, the mother of Draco Malfoy, wife of Lucius Malfoy and sister of Voldemort’s right hand woman, Bellatrix Lestrange, who is to be played by Helen McCrory. This is McCrory’s second casting in a Potter movie, as according to IMDB (the Internet Movie DataBase), McCrory was due to play Bellatrix in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, before dropping out due to pregnancy.

Then there’s Professor Horace Slugworm, Harry’s 6th year potions master and the man who unwittingly gave him a second hand potions book belonging to the eponymous Half-Blood Prince, he will be played by the fantastic character actor Jim Broadbent, an excellent match if ever there was one.

Finally, comes Lavender Brown, ickle Won-Won’s girlfriend for the bulk of the piece, who is to be played by a relative newcomer to the profession, Jessie Cave. Cave beat out over 7000 girls to win the role, so hopefully she’ll do it well. Also cast were the younger versions of Tom Riddle, (Voldemort’s real name) with Hero Fiennes Tiffin playing the young and naive (but not innocent) Riddle at age 11 and Frank Dillane playing the teenage Riddle already well on the path to darkness.

With David Yates, the director from Order of the Phoenix, returning, here’s hoping that the 6th installment is treated as well as the 5th was, and paves the way to the series’ climactic final showdown in number 7.