A new trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was released during the Warner Bros. panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2018, and it reveals a little more about what will be happening in the highly anticipated sequel.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them graced our screens in 2016 and took us back to a time in the Wizarding World before Harry Potter’s parents even existed. The sequel will see Eddie Redmayne reprise the role of Newt Scamander, a magizoologist who later becomes famous within the Wizarding World for his indispensable guide to magical creatures, which is frequently used as a textbook for young witches and wizards.
In the new trailer, we are presented with a young version of Newt Scamander, which is perfectly cast by the way, where Jude Law’s younger incarnation of Albus Dumbledore is teaching Defence Against The Dark Arts with an always humorous subject matter—a boggart. What is young Newt most afraid of? Spiders, snakes, or the dark? No. He’s afraid of an office job. As the trailer continues, the Newt we currently know is approached by Dumbledore to track down the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) as he has travelled to Paris to recruit followers and help give pureblood wizards full control over non-magical beings. While finding Grindelwald will take up most of Newt’s time, there still looks as though there will be plenty new and familiar magical creatures for us to discover and learn about along the way.
At the end of the trailer, there is a surprising new character who goes by the name, Nicholas Flamel (Brontis Jodorowsky)… If you don’t remember who Flamel is, cast your mind back to the very first film and book and you will remember he is the creator of the philosopher/sorcerer’s stone.
During the Comic-Con panel, Johnny Depp surprised fans in his full Grindewald get-up and exclaimed, “We who live for freedom or truth, the moment has come to rise up and take our rightful place in the world,” he told the crowd, while waving a wand. While Depp was in costume, Ezra Miller (who plays Credence) donned a different sort of costume and opted to be Toadette.
After the audience previewed the trailer, Jude Law explained that “the Muggle world and Wizard world are pitched against each other, but the wizards are asked which side of the line and which side they’re joining. The depths of this story are probably the darkest this has plumbed,” he said. When asked about how old Dumbledore is, he responded with, ” a very sprightly 45. I love the fact that he’s called young Dumbledore because I’m 45 and I’m clinging onto that. You’ve got to remember the Dumbledore we’ve known and loved from the Harry Potter films is over 100 years old.”
The film will see Eddie Redmayne, Ezra Miller, Dan Fogler, Katherine Waterston, and Johnny Depp all return to reprise their roles and then also joined by newcomers including Jude Law, Zoe Kravitz, Callum Turner, and Claudia Kim, and we can read further about them in the official character descriptions.
Jude Law plays a young Albus Dumbledore, taking on the mantle of one of J.K. Rowling’s most beloved characters; Ezra Miller makes a return as the enigmatic Credence, whose fate was unknown at the end of the first film; Claudia Kim appears as a Maledictus, the carrier of a blood curse that destines her ultimately to transform into a beast; Zoe Kravitz plays Leta Lestrange, who had once been close to Newt Scamander but is now engaged to his brother; Callum Turner joins the cast as Newt’s older brother, Theseus Scamander, a celebrated war hero and the Head of the Auror Office at the British Ministry of Magic; Katherine Waterston returns as Tina Goldstein, who has been reinstated as an Auror for MACUSA; Eddie Redmayne stars again as wizarding world Magizoologist Newt Scamander, who has now gained fame in the wizarding world as the author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; Dan Fogler reprises the role of the only No-Maj in the group, Jacob Kowalski; Alison Sudol reprises the part of Tina’s free-spirited sister, Queenie Goldstein, a Legilimens who can read minds; and Johnny Depp returns as the powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is scheduled for release November 16th 2018.
