Entertainment Weekly The Ultimate Guide to Fantastic Beasts

By The Editors of Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly Magazine presents Fantastic Beasts

• Language: English
• Publisher: Entertainment Weekly
• Release date: Nov 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547845729

Book preview

Dumbledore.

PART I

Fantastic Beasts

The Crimes of Grindelwald

A Very Fantastic Sequel

Newt Scamander is back! J.K. Rowling continues the thrilling tale of the wizarding war brewing between Dumbledore and the dark sorcerer Grindelwald. BY KEVIN P. SULLIVAN

Eddie Redmayne returns as Newt Scamander with a silhouette that’s just a little more adult, a little more refined, says returning costume designer Colleen Atwood.

THERE’S SOMETHING FAMILIAR ABOUT THE man on the bridge—the one with the twinkle in his eye. Maybe it’s the mildly impish smile or the beginnings of a beard that will eventually grow down to his belly. He replies to the name Albus Dumbledore, but the Dumbledore meeting magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) in the fog above the Thames isn’t the Hogwarts headmaster who guided readers and movie­goers through so many adventures.

Not yet, at least.

The Dumbledore audiences will meet when Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald opens in theaters Nov. 16—the one played by two-time Oscar nominee Jude Law—is a damaged man. This is Albus Dumbledore when he was roughly my age, 45 or thereabouts, Law says. He has an awful long way to go to find the place spiritually, mentally, emotionally that he’s at when you meet him through Harry Potter. He’s trapped in an emotional full-body bind because of secrets from his past. There’s a part of Dumbledore that considers himself a bit of a monster, Law says. He’s a bit of a beast because of the things he’s done. As Crimes of Grindelwald begins, Dumbledore is in need of someone he can trust, someone who understands beasts. Fortunately, there’s no one better than Newt who is ready to spring into heroic action once more.

At the end of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—the first installment in a planned five-part series scripted by J.K. Rowling herself—the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (played in disguise by Colin Farrell, then in his true form by Johnny Depp) was in custody. He had come to America to bring the powerful repressed magic of Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller) under his control, until Newt and his friends foiled the plot. But despite the efforts of MACUSA—the Magical Congress of the United States of America for the No-Majs out there—Grindelwald escapes, in a flying thestral-drawn carriage, no less. Dumbledore, as the villain’s former companion, knows exactly the dark future Grindelwald foresees—wizards ruling all from atop a new world order—and he needs his former student to help stop him. In short, Newt’s got bigger problems than a loose Niffler on his hands this time around.

Just as the Harry Potter books and film adaptations grew more complex as the series went on, Rowling has transformed the tone of the Fantastic Beasts series. "The Crimes of Grindelwald is more intense than the first film, says director David Yates, back for his sixth movie in the Wizarding World. [It’s] an emotional mystery with multiple characters and bigger themes."

That isn’t to say that making the first Fantastic Beasts movie was an easy day in Charms class. The 2016 film needed to introduce a new set of characters—in a new era—and serve as a faithful follow-up to a $7.7 billion worldwide phenomenon. We didn’t know how it was going to be received, says Alison Sudol, who plays mind-reading MACUSA employee Queenie.

While plot specifics for Crimes of Grindelwald are being protected more tightly than a Gringotts vault ahead of the film’s release, the theme of character connections deepening is everywhere. At the center of it all once again is the same likable troupe of unlikely heroes—Newt, Tina (Katherine Waterston), Queenie and Jacob (Dan Fogler)—but now their relationships are becoming as tangled as a devil’s snare.

After the publication of his book and some newfound acclaim, Newt is trying desperately to get back to Tina in New York. We find Newt basically with his wings clipped in the British Ministry of Magic, surrounded by bureaucracy and trying to get a travel permit to return to New York, Redmayne says. Part of the journey of the film is Newt and Tina reconnecting and finding each other. I love playing that side of the story because they’re both hopeless, and they are also incapable of communicating properly.

To hear Waterston tell it, there may be more to that miscommunication than distance. He’s making excuses, she says. They’re in a long-distance relationship now. As anybody who’s ever done that knows, wires do get crossed, and misunderstandings happen.

Tina and Newt aren’t the only ones struggling to make it work. After Queenie walks back into Jacob’s life and rejogs his seemingly obliviated memory, the pair are together, but the world wants to keep them apart. Strict rules in America prohibiting any contact between witches and No-Majs prevent Queenie and Jacob from living freely, so she takes the issue into her own magical hands. It’s Queenie’s idea, which was a very lovely idea, but she tricked Jacob [into leaving America], Fogler says. Then, of course, spells wear off.

As the heroes reunite in England, they’re brought face-to-face with Newt’s past in the form of his best friend (and possibly more) from Hogwarts, Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz), and his competitive brother Theseus (Callum Turner). It gets worse: They’re engaged. It’s unclear whether Newt and Leta’s relationship was romantic or confusing, Kravitz says. They were both so young when they met.

All of that would be enough drama without a wizard-supremacist on the loose. The hunt for Grindelwald will take Newt to yet another country, and 1920s Paris promises to hold dazzling sights, like a circus only wizards can see. It’s for the outcasts [of] that world, says costume designer Colleen Atwood. It’s the underworld of Paris.

But Newt and Co. will have to face all of this without the direct aid of Dumbledore. We know from the Harry Potter series that Grindelwald’s reign of terror eventually ends in 1945 after a legendary duel with Dumbledore. But as the headmaster later explains to Harry, it took him years to realize that only he could take down the dark wizard. They say he feared me, and perhaps he did, but less, I think, than I feared him, Dumbledore says of Grindelwald.

That fear was what Law wanted to capture. He spent hours with Rowling, learning as much as he could without nose-diving into a Pensieve. "The younger Dumbledore has been navigating a deep sense of loss