This Harry Potter Uses a Bow and Arrow. Not a Wand.

NEW YORK — The English actor Jamie Parker knelt on the floor of Gotham Archery in Chinatown last week. His left hand clutched a hefty bamboo bow, his right one nocked a red-fletched arrow.

“This is going to be a story about me hospitalizing some innocent bystander,” Parker said. Happily, the arrow thunked into its target, a green-spotted ball that really had it coming. “Reparo,” he said.

“Reparo” is the mending spell from the Harry Potter books, a collection Parker, 38, knows inside and out. The star of Broadway’s “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” he is up for a best actor Tony for his portrayal of Harry, the boy wizard who lived and kept living, and has yet to put in the hours with a grief counselor.

This new story, devised by JK Rowling in collaboration with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany, begins 19 years after the last book ends and shows how the traumas of Harry’s childhood and adolescence warp his relationship with his younger son.

Parker “embodies Potter pain beautifully,” wrote Ben Brantley, a theater critic of The New York Times. But while he and Harry share the same compact, deceptively muscled body, they don’t look exactly alike.

When he arrived at the archery range, Parker’s hair was blond, not Harry’s brown. His eyes are brown, not Harry’s green. There’s no lightning bolt scar, just a couple of chickenpox divots. And on his downtime, he wears neat rectangular glasses, not the round ones for which Harry is known.

Also, Parker didn’t need much battle magic to make it to adulthood. But when he turned 21, a friend gave him a Hungarian recurve horseback bow. A few years later, Parker learned to use it, aiming at bottles and balloons in the backyard of the house an hour outside of London that he shares with his wife and son.

“Sounds kind of redneck, doesn’t it?” he said. Other talents: the piano, Rubik’s Cube, self-deprecation.

Parker’s instructor at the range, Russell Johnson, handed him a fiberglass bow named Prometheus, strapped him into a bright green arm guard and a red hip quiver, and pointed him toward a paper target. The bull’s-eye survived.

As the Tony voters must know, Parker has a tendency to aim high. Also he grips the bow too hard.

“Be the bow,” Johnson advised.

Parker missed again.

“Be more of the bow,” Johnson said.

Still Parker kept his spirits up, entertaining Johnson with fun archery facts (apparently 6 million geese were seconded for their feathers during Henry V’s invasion of France) and quoting from “Zen in the Art of Archery,” a favorite book.

After emptying a couple of quivers, Parker managed a bull’s-eye. He and Prometheus weren’t well suited, so Johnson offered him Venus, a slightly heavier bow.

Parker looked good holding it. He was ready for a Robin Hood series, he joked. But his shots still went wide and high.

“You’re overthinking it,” Johnson said. “Don’t stand so rigid.”

Harry is an overthinker, too. In “Cursed Child,” he spends more time worrying about his son than simply loving him. Parker played the original role in London almost two years ago, and he beat out Ed Harris, Tom Hollander and Ian McKellen for the Best Actor Olivier Award.

“I’ve got a lot less to prove to myself now aside from the ‘every single time I walk on stage’ bit,” Parker said.

His Harry is beleaguered, brittle, sometimes unkind, a surprise for any fan expecting a happily ever after. “If no one has ever taught you to be a dad, and all you’ve ever known is how to be a fighter and anyone you’ve ever loved has left you by dying horrendously or has nearly died horrendously,” happy can be elusive, he said. Maybe it’s time for Rowling to write “Harry Potter and the Really Helpful Therapist.”

Parker isn’t a method actor, but he still draws on his own life to feed Harry’s distress. “You don’t have to have a history of horrendous abuse to know that you’ve had your own brushes with loss and isolation and your own form of despair and you can chase that and amplify it,” he said.

Mostly he thinks about being sent to boarding school at 11 and what it means to take a child “away from all of their primary carers and everything that’s familiar and into an institution that ultimately is indifferent,” he said.

Those are dark places to linger, especially on two-show days, so Parker looks for ways to refocus and unclench. Archery is one of them. “You spend half an hour doing this and you get to a very empty-headed place,” he said.

It was true that afternoon.

After Venus didn’t work out, Johnson offered one of his own bows. This one, made by Johnson’s father, didn’t have a name. It weighed more than 60 pounds and stood nearly as tall as Parker.

The third bow was the charm. The Zen kicked in, the arrows whizzed home, slamming into a bull’s-eye so close together that they could kiss. “You have a natural eye,” Johnson said.

Johnson offered a pheasant as a target, but Parker found it too realistic, so he set up red and yellow balls, buoyed up by a wind machine. “This is when I’m going to do nothing but embarrass myself,” Parker said.

He squinted his eyes, drew back the string, and seconds later his arrow had skewered a red ball. It may not have been the ball he was aiming for, but it was close enough.

“Brilliant,” Parker said.