Being a famous movie actor always looks like it's a life of glamor. While that may be the case a lot of the time, there are also points when doing the job requires you to embarrass yourself. Eddie Redmayne was required to perform a mating dance during Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and it was apparently on him to create the dance himself. Luckily, he knew just the person to help him put it together.
I worked with Alexander Reynolds, who is a choreographer who worked on The Theory of Everything and The Danish Girl. She and I went into a huge hole of watching birds do mating dances, and I then did, I videoed myself. Or no, she videoed me doing about 10 different equally humiliating mating dances. The longest hours of my life, were between each time I sent one of those videos to David Yates, and waited for feedback. [laughter] And what you saw in the film was pretty humiliating, but out there, there are several videos that would end my career.
So if David Yates has all those tapes, is there a chance we could see the other version of the mating dance on the Blu-Ray? The admission of embarrassment and the details that his Danish Girl choreographer helped him out for a third time, came from our own Greg Wakeman who attended the press day for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
In the film, as Newt Scamander is trying to recapture his Fantastic Beasts that have escaped, he finds his missing erumpent, a sort of elephant/rhino hybrid in Central Park. In an attempt to get it back into his magical case, he has to perform an elaborate dance that will draw it toward him. While the full clip is not currently available online, you'll have to see the movie to check that out, he did teach the dance to Jimmy Fallon earlier this month.
Sometimes you get to be the guy looking like a badass in a massive action sequence, and sometimes you get to perform a mating dance at a massive CGI creature. Being an actor is a weird job.
If you want to see Newt Scamander perform the dance in its entirety, which will surely embarrass the hell out of Eddie Redmayne, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is in theaters now.
