'Claudia Kim ( The Dark Tower, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Marco Polo) as a young woman first encountered as a featured attraction at a wizarding circus. The new major cast members and characters are, per Deadline: And if you read the Harry Potter book series closely, you'll also remember that Albus and Grindelwald were definitely into each other before the latter went all ethno-cleanse-crazy, so it's safe to say this battle is going to be major for all of the characters involved. If you saw the first Fantastic Beasts, you'll remember that film ended with Scamander temporarily defeating Grindelwald in New York City. Although we already knew that Jude Law had been tapped for the role of Albus Dumbledore, the studio has now confirmed to multiple sources that the next film will see Dumbledore and his former Hogwarts student Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) team up to battle the genocidal wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp). The new series is set in the wizarding world 70 years before the events of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. “The idea in these animistic cultures is that you’re trying to draw the local spirits into a house to live,” he says, “and you’re going to provide them with food and drink and a nice place to live and then they won’t disrupt your business or family.Accio plot details! As the second installment of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series begins shooting, Warner Brothers has finally revealed more info about the movie's storyline and cast-and you can color us intrigued. Rowling’s also made it clear the favorite newcomer in the beastly world is the niffler, a platypus-like, trouble-making creature “with a penchant for anything shiny,” which Asma says could tie back to a religious tradition called animism, in which the world is full of “little mischievous spirits.”

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterĪsma notes that many of the Wizarding World’s creatures are similar to some of the most famous in mythology.įor example, Scamander’s story introduces creatures like the occamy, described on Rowling’s site Pottermore as a “two-legged winged creature with a serpentine body, that is fiercely protective of its eggs,” which Asma says sounds a lot like the Greek mythological griffin, a winged lion known for aggressively guarding its eggs. “That they’re just creatures like us trying to get through life, and we can befriend them and they can help us and we can help them.” What I like about Rowling is she’s going back to this other notion of monsters,” Asma says. “So this makes monsters in the Christian tradition pretty much all evil.

Fantastic beast and to find them