We caught up with stars Eddie Redmayne and Katherine Waterston to discuss their new film “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” out this Friday.
If any of you think that it’s just Harry Potter fans who want to see and know more about the magical place that Hogwarts is, we’re here to tell you that you’re not alone!
Eddie: Do you think if we complain enough in press about not going to Hogwarts that’ll help? [implying how he and his fellow cast members wanted to be there more]
Katherine: No!
Eddie: I mean I did go around and scope out the classrooms, the sets that were built, and may have taken a selfie or two.
Katherine: And that was not nothing, that was really cool to see but no we didn’t get the full experience. Zoe really got it and obviously Jude to be surrounded. I wish what I really could’ve seen was all the students you know because this generation they know what they’re a part of now and they’ve grown up with this so apparently they were just bouncing off the walls, all these young actors in Hogwarts uniform. I wish I’d seen them.
Here the cast let us know more about how Fantastic Beasts is more than just a prequel to the beloved Harry Potter sequels.
This film has been trailed for drawing some political parallels with things that are happening in America-
Jokingly Katherine responds with, “Really how so?”, as the room joins in on the laughter.
Is that something that is important to you guys, do you like that it’s being perceived in that way?
Katherine: You know J.K. Rowling has always been interested in the shades of gray, whether it’s about the characters or bigger broader issues and we’re in such a divided time right now and everybody is you know, like if you watch MSNBC and then you flip over to FOX it’s like ‘are these two different planets?’ And I think people are starting to realize and the value of trying to come together and meet in the middle and get away from the far edges a little.
Eddie: Yeah it’s reflecting history on contemporary times as well, I think basically great artists have this antenna and this sort of sensitivity, almost like virtue of future seers. This film was written three years ago and that’s how long it takes for it to come out and she [J.K. Rowling] is reminding us in some ways, by exposing this time in Muggle history, what happened and drawing parallels to what it is now, but what she does extraordinarily, I think, is she also creates these worlds of joy, of magic, of sort of romance and excitement so you sort of you leave the film having seen a spectacle and then you begin to think about the elements of it that actually kind of reflect where we are now as well.
It seems that the stunt work has gotten bigger, in this sequel, I don’t know if maybe you can speak to that more?
Katherine: Think of the alternative, we have to make them bigger and better.
In this second Fantastic Beasts movie there’s a scene where Newt and Tina find themselves in a room full of records and that was a scene they did some pretty cool stunt work together!
Katherine: “Yeah! Now what are we gonna have to do in the next one, cause those records almost killed us a couple times.”
Eddie: What was weird about the records was they built all these things that went up and turned, but it was really really hard to hold on to, we needed like a climber grip to hold onto. After about three minutes, we were literally like ‘I can’t feel my fingertips’. We were like ‘Have you got this? Have you got this? Have you got this?’
Katherine: “hat is what’s amazing about these films, like everything is so well thought out and really like brilliantly done, and then every now and then there’s like a low budget moment, where you feel, ‘are we making a student film?’. Like there was this day when we had to go down a set of stairs that nobody had built so we had to act and I mean it doesn’t make you feel cool.
Eddie: We literally had to do that. But the worst thing is that we had to run down the street in character, and then look down the steps and then *Eddie showed us his best ‘going down the stairs pantomime*, I was quite excited about this moment, I’ve waited all my actor life to do it.
Katherine: I was trying to summon Mike Myers in Austin Powers. It was humiliating, it didn’t make it in the film, for some reason..
Eddie: David was like you’re looking like a duck!
Compared to the first film this one is very complex I felt, especially you have to make a choice between good and evil, the boundary between the two, how do you express yourself in a more complex situation?
Eddie: I think it was a lot to do with the situation that Jo put us in. Like what I love about Newt is he’s always been an outsider but he’s created an exoskeleton in a way in which to exist and that is this cocoon of his case, basement, his creatures, those things that he can relate to. He’s a morally, good, kind and pathetic wizard but he’s created this exoskeleton, that doesn’t mean he has to go out into the world and in the last movie, this one, opened his heart and so he’s trying to sort of entice her [Tina] back into his cocoon but the stakes in the world are so extreme now, a big question for him is ‘Is that enough? Is it good enough to just be a good person, or at some point do you actually have to engage in the world and make choices’ and particularly with the family stuff and the fact that these guys are at each other and yet there is great love between them is, you know it’s all stuff that Jo writes so brilliantly because the characters aren’t one dimensional they’re being pulled and tugged and pushed and ‘knotty’ is the word David Yates used to describe Newt, ‘he’s quite a knotty character’
I know many of us are wondering, how involved was J.K. Rowling with the filming of these films, especially because there’s no book series to it.
Was Jo there on set with you guys?
Katherine: No, she’s far too distracting. She comes around set and everything shuts down. We’re all like moths to a light, ‘tell us everything’. She’s really so enchanting and plus she’s got all the goods and she’s got all the details as far as characters go. The thing she understands is that she has that power over us and she knows we have a film to make, so she doesn’t come around all the time but it’s always awesome when she does and she’s always watching us.
Eddie: But also she watches and she even says the way Callum’s character, Theseus, was written in the script was quite like, he was quite a bit mean to Newt, but the way Callum played him made him so human in trying to do the right thing and ‘I’ve got my own struggles’ and when Jo saw that and said to me that … when she then sees that footage she then responds to that in how she writes the characters going forward so it is kind of a lovely dance in some way.
If any of you have been wanting some inside scoop on what to expect from the next films, the cast members are right there with you!
Are you sort of given a road map as to where your characters are sort of plotted out over these next few films?
Katherine: No
Eddie: We found out the other day, we got off an airplane, and we saw that J.K. Rowling had tweeted that some of the next film is going to be set in Rio de Janeiro.
Katherine: I mean we’d love to know because it’d be fun but it’s just like real life of course, I mean it’s not difficult to play a character who doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to them next because that’s like being a person, so it’s really fun. You just have to be where you are now and just try to tell that bit of the story and hope it continues to be a wonderful challenge but I don’t think any of us are worried that she’s gonna continue to send us in interesting directions and stretch us in new ways, cause she just always does that.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is out in theatres November 16th.
Check out our other Fantastic Beasts articles for more exclusive details with the cast!
