Newt Scamander, the hero of ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them’, has a dark secret, “as some of JK Rowlings’ characters do” says director David Yates in a contender for ‘Understatement of the Year 2016’.
You won’t learn Newt’s “dark secret” in these interviews with Eddie Redmayne and his costars — but there are lots of new details about Fantastic Beasts and its human characters which are revealed. The Newt excerpts:
David Yates, director: Newt’s a real sweetheart. He’s obsessed with magical creatures so he’s quite geeky, very knowledgeable, but not very good with people, so he’s a little detached from society and the real world.
Eddie Redmayne: One of the things I love about Newt is that he’s like a good wizard, but he’s not like an extraordinary wizard.
Newt goes and finds fantastic beasts that are in danger, because they’re a threat to the statute of secrecy [in the Wizarding World] and he looks after them. He’s quite an idealist. He believes that – with the right education programs – fantastic beasts should be able to exist in magical society.
There’s something in the script that J.K. Rowling describes as Keaton-esque in the way that he walks. He’s not someone that’s used to big cities and that was where I sort of started with him.
Alison Sudol: It’s not just about Newt coming into contact with new people; it’s like an entirely different universe for him. He’s been out in the wild for a while so it’s really extra new for him.
David Yates, director: Newt’s absolutely charming and very knowledgeable – he’s like David Attenborough in the wild world, except he deals with these crazy animals that are off the scale of extraordinary.
He’s really absorbed with the beautiful things in nature, the most amazing things in the natural world and so in this movie his journey is really to sort of appreciate what it is to have intimacy with things other than amazing beasts.
Eddie Redmayne: He does have a vulnerability but it’s not like he’s striving for a connection with humans. At the beginning of the film, he’s very happy in himself. He’s seemingly completely content in his skin, but it’s only when he realises that he can have a connection, that he sort of begins to fall for Tina. He connects with Tina and it’s very slow burn but it’s been wonderful to play. They start as antagonists, finding each other deeply frustrating, but by the end there’s a kind of sense of something.
David Yates, director: What’s lovely about Newt is that he’s very funny but very lonely at the same time, so there’s something really compelling about him. I think the audience will feel for him but they’ll also find him very endearing and very funny.
And he has a dark secret – as some of Jo’s [JK Rowling] characters do – which we discover as the movie unfolds.
Eddie Redmayne: The film takes place over 2 days, so it’s a short period, and I love that. But these four people find themselves unexpectedly thrown together and they really are kind of very different people – two sisters and the muggle – which is Jacob – and then myself, and this is not a natural fit at all…
Dan Fogler: Jacob’s a very likeable guy and very sociable and he knows the New York streets and he’s definitely on the other side of the spectrum to Newt.
Newt is very cerebral, he’s like the Charles Darwin of magical creatures and I’m just this guy from New York that wants to open a bakery, you know? That’s it, he’s just a really loveable, likeable guy and the two of them kind of balance each other. It’s like a Sherlock and Watson situation.
Katherine Waterston: Tina’s a recently demoted witch. I don’t think I can tell you why she was demoted but obviously, as it would do to just about anyone, her confidence isn’t at an all-time high at the moment, at least not when we first meet her at the beginning of the film…Her relationship with Newt? I think if you’re peculiar, it’s nice to meet other peculiar people. Whether it’s romantic or not, it’s lonely when you feel like you’re the only peculiar person out there. I think Newt and Tina are both kinda offbeat and have a lot of qualities that have often been attributed to geeks. I don’t really think of them as geeks, just a little bit unusual.
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