Jun 24, 2016 12:51 PM EDT
The Harry Potter franchise is coming back to the big screen this year in the form of a Hogwarts textbook turned into J.K. Rowling screenplay, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and that means more information about our return to the wizarding world -- and the franchise's new hero. A new promo for the Warner Bros. film gives us a sneak peek at Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander!
Barely a few days after the release of the official poster for Fantastic Beasts, the promised new footage came about in the form of a new featurette. In it, Rowling, the brilliant mind behind Harry Potter and the film's screenplay, talks about Newt Scamander and how, like Harry, he's also an "odd one out" type of character, feeling outside the norm.
"My heroes are always people who feel themselves to be set apart, stigmatized or othered," Rowling explains in the promo. "That's at the heart of most of what I write, and it's certainly at the heart of this movie."
Rowling goes on to tell fans of the saga how, when she was writing Harry Potter, she became interested with Newt Scamander, a character that she had established as an author in the books. As fans will remember from their numerous readings, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is in fact a textbook at Hogwarts-- a sort of encyclopedia of magical creatures within this universe.
Newt Scamander actor Redmayne, who won an Academy Award for his take on Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, also speaks on the featurette and shares a little bit of his thoughts about the character, including how he feels "more at home with creatures than he does with human beings."
The clip also has bits and pieces of great-looking new footage.
While this is the first time Fantastic Beasts is fictionalized, Rowling has tackled it in the past, outside the 7-book canon. Back in 2001, the billionaire author released the actual Hogwarts textbook, in what's supposed to be Harry's own copy, with annotations from the Boy Who Lived and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Sales of the book go to benefit Comic Relief, a charity Rowling has worked with for many years.
The story is set in the 1920s, decades before the events of the seven Harry Potter books. Ahead of the release of the film, Rowling posted a series of stories in Pottermore to give fans some knowledge of the history of magic in the United States.
