Tony Winners Featured in Fantastic Beasts Film, Opening Today | Playbill

News Tony Winners Featured in Fantastic Beasts Film, Opening Today Set partly in 1930’s New York, it’s J.K. Rowling’s prequel to the Harry Potter adventures.
Eddie Redmayne 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Harry Potter film spinoff, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, opens in cinemas across the U.S. November 18.

The cast features two Tony Award winners. Eddie Redmayne, a Tony winner for Red and a 2015 Oscar winner for The Theory of Everything, plays the lead, Newton Artemis Fido “Newt” Scamander, a graduate of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who specializes in magical and supernatural animals. Dan Fogler (The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee) plays Jacob, a “muggle” (non-magical person).

Entertainment weekly reported that the film will introduce new terms into “the Potterverse lexicon, and the most significant might be what Stateside wizards say instead of Muggle: 'No-Maj' (pronounced ‘no madge,’ as in 'no magic').”

Unlike the rest of the Harry Potter stories, Fantastic Beasts is set at least partly in the U.S., specifically New York.

The cast also includes Katherine Waterston as Scamander’s wife, Tina, Alison Sudol as Tina’s sister Queenie, Ezra Miller as Credence, plus Samantha Morton, Jenn Murray, Faith Wood-Blagrove and Colin Farrell.

Scheduled for release in 3D and IMAX, the film is an adaptation of the real/fictional book of the same title, ostensibly written by Scamander, but actually penned by the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling. The book was originally published in 2001 to benefit the Comic Relief Charity. The action of the story takes place 70 years before the time of the "Harry Potter" books.

Rowling has written the screenplay herself — a first — and it is planned as the first film of a trilogy for Warner Bros. Pictures. It is directed by David Yates, who also directed four of the Harry Potter movies.

Here is a longer clip from the film:

 
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