15 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets About “Fantastic Beasts” According To The Cast Themselves

“My lovely stepson, who back then would’ve been about five years old, kept talking to me about this game called Quidditch, and I thought it was a real game,” Jude laughed. “He kept describing it, and it wasn’t until he mentioned broomsticks that I was like, ‘What?!'”

Eddie Redmayne revealed the cast are kept in the dark just like the rest of us: “We just don’t know what’s coming. Occasionally when Jo came to set on the first one, we’d get snippets and ideas — we had a sense of where it was going to be set. But you literally sit down and take it in, and I drank it up. I found my jaw on the floor, and I had to go back over it and try to tie all these things together.”

“I was in Los Angeles — I was working on something else — and it came in, and I had other work I should’ve been doing but I just dropped everything,” Katherine said of the first time she saw the script. “I mean, it’s so exciting, you know. We’re only a few months ahead of the rest of the world with this stuff, because there isn’t a series of books.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever read a script and then had to go back and think, ‘Hold on, this is a film,'” he told BuzzFeed. “The world I was already invested in, the references were all references to books I’ve read and films I’ve seen, so it was a kind of unique experience. I had to go back then and look at it from an actor point of view.”

“It was a scene with Katherine and Dan, in which this Murtlap bursts out of the case,” he remembered. “I was so nervous — I was wearing all these layers of tweed, and it was summer — that I sweated so much they basically had to stop filming, bring in an air conditioner, and blast it only at me. Everyone else was wearing coats, and everyone else was fine. It actually genuinely brings me out in hives just thinking about it.”

“I think they’d done at least four, five weeks,” he said of his first time filming. “I got to come in during that time to have costume fittings and beard-length fittings and all sorts of things.”

When he found out that was the first thing Jude filmed, Eddie said he would find that “quite stressful”.

It’s the audience’s first time seeing Leta Lestrange, and director David Yates had Eddie and Zoë Kravitz look into camera to give the impression that they’re looking at each other.

“We’re meant to be showing this whole history of a relationship, staring straight down the barrel of a lens,” Eddie told BuzzFeed. “I found it really hard. We had to do about 900 takes.”

“I said to David, ‘Don’t worry, we can do 20 minute takes, I’ve got this!’ And then of course, what I didn’t realise was that film sets are the most hardcore, quite intense places. The point is, to be able to hold your breath that long, you have to be in an incredibly zen place. I could hold it for about three seconds, that’s why it’s a very short scene,” Eddie laughed.

“He wasn’t offered. I guess when you’re playing Dumbledore, they’re like, ‘You must know,'” Katherine joked.

“I carried a wand-length piece of wood — a twig, basically — around with me for a whole summer in preparation,” Jude revealed. “I just wanted to get used to having this thing and playing with it.”

We know Tom Riddle was born in 1926 — meaning he would’ve gone to Hogwarts in 1937 — and the Fantastic Beasts story will end in 1945, so the timeline definitely works out.

“It’d be amazing to have Tom Riddle appear as a little boy,” he said. “To see him at Hogwarts, being taught by Dumbledore — even if it was just in passing, this little kid bullying someone else, or sitting in a corner. That would be amazing.”

“I auditioned — and very, very badly failed — for the part of Tom Riddle,” Eddie joked. “I think it would be the one moment, if Tom Riddle were to walk past Newt at Hogwarts, that Newt wouldn’t be quite so nice any more.”