Gotta love beasts. They’re fantastic — at least, if you can find them. Luckily, the new Harry Potter spinoff film is based on the mini-made-for-charity pseudo-textbook Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them — which will, if its title doesn’t betray us, feature some fantastic beasts, and, as if that weren’t enough, their locations. As we now know, it’ll also feature Eddie Redmayne and Katherine Waterston playing non-beasts. But perhaps most exciting is today’s news that Ezra Miller (of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and maybe for a hot second my computer’s desktop) may soon be signing on to play another human.
According to Variety, the actor is in discussion to play the role of Kredan (derived from creton? credenza?) in the upcoming film (with Redmayne slated to play the lead, Newt Scamander, and Waterston playing his future wife — as per the book — Porpentina). Surely as we get closer to production, entertainment news will become a parade of announcements about the casting of equally tickling names.
For now, all we know about this Kredan is that, according to Variety, he’s “a person with magical powers who encounters magizoologist Newt Scamander when he stops in New York City on his travels to find and document magical creatures.” The film is, indeed, centered around this NYC adventure of Scamander’s, and apart from Scamander, it stars two American girls and two American boys (with Waterston seemingly playing one of the girls and Miller potentially playing one of the boys). The two yet-to-be-cast roles are Porpentina’s younger sister, Queenie and Scamander’s rival, Jacob (hard to see how he could rival Scamander with such a lackluster name). Sources have indicated that Alison Sudol is possibly being considered to play Queenie, while Josh Gad and Michael Cera will be talking with execs next week about the role of Jacob.
Warner Bros. is aiming for a November 18, 2016 release for the film, which is written by J.K. Rowling, directed by David Yates and produced by David Heyman.