There's magic in the air, can you feel it? Maybe it's knowing that somewhere across the pond, filming has gotten underway for the anticipated Harry Potter spinoff movie Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. Production follows an interesting update on the characters from Harry Potter J.K. Rowling, who revealed this weekend that two of the lead characters are distant relatives to a member of Dumbledore's Army.
While Tweeting her support for Scottish Rugby, J.K. Rowling thanked fans for joining her by offering up this nugget of information about two of the lead female characters in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them...
If the name Goldstein rings a Harry Potter bell, it's because Harry Potter featured a character named Anthony Goldstein, whom Rowling has confirmed is distantly related to Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie (Alison Sudol)...
Anthony Goldstein was featured in Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix as one of the Ravenclaw students who joined Dumbledore's Army. He was friends with Terry Boot and Michael Corner, the latter of whom dated Ginny Weasley for a little while.
It's a fun update from Rowling, and it offers another link between the characters in Fantastic Beasts and the ones we're so familiar with from the Harry Potter stories. And the last name fills in one more blank for both Queenie and her sister. As Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is more of a reference guide than it is a story, we know almost nothing about the characters. In the case of Tina, we do know she and lead character Newt Scamander, author of the titular textbook, are destined for romance. Whether or not that's introduced in the film remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Warner Bros. did pass along official word that Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them has begun production at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden. The description for the movie doesn't really give anything new away, but it does seem to shape the set-up of the story a tad bit more...
Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne ("The Theory of Everything") stars as Newt Scamander, the wizarding world’s preeminent magizoologist, who stops in New York following his travels to find and document magical creatures.
We've known for a while that the story would have Newt visiting New York (some seventy years before Harry Potter's enrollment at Hogwarts), and that he's abroad studying magical creatures for the eventual text book he'll go on to write. The description suggests he was either fully or partway through his travels when he arrives in New York. Ok, maybe I'm grasping at wands here, but that does add a little something to what we know about the movie. It may be safe to assume Newt already has some experience and research under his belt as he arrives in New York.
In addition to Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston and Alison Sudol, the cast also includes Dan Fogler (Jacob), Ezra Miller (Credence), Samantha Morton (Mary Lou), Jenn Murray (Chastity), Faith Wood-Blagrove (Modesty) and Colin Farrell, as Graves. Directed by David Yates, based on a script by J.K. Rowling, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is scheduled to arrive in theaters in IMAX and 3D on November 18, 2016.
