Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is up one more fantastic actor. Joining Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller and Alison Sudol is none other than Colin Farrell, who will be brandishing a wand in the anticipated prequel-ish movie, which is due to hit theaters next year.
Not a lot is known about the character Colin Farrell is set to play, though The Hollywood Reporter does say that his name is Graves, he's a wizard, and he's someone Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) will meet when he's in New York. Given how little we know about the plot of the film, that's actually a decent amount of information, particularly the bit about him being a wizard.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is set some seventy years before Harry Potter attended Hogwarts (so, around the 1920s), and centers on Newt Scamander, a magizoologist who's penning a book about (fantastic) beasts (and where to find them). As Harry Potter fans likely know, the eventual textbook would go on to be studied by Hogwarts students, including Harry Potter.
The film is set to take place in New York. In addition to Eddie Redmayne, the cast includes Dan Fogler (playing the role of Jacob), Alison Sudol (as Queenie), Ezra Miller (as Kredan), and Katherine Waterston, who's playing the role of Tina (Queenie's sister and potentially Newt's love interest.)
The source material, which is a reference guide J.K. Rowling actually wrote and had published for charity, doesn't give us a whole lot to go on in the way of character descriptions... or characters at all, really, beyond a general introduction about Newt (and a mention of his eventual wife, Porpentina). So character speculation has been all but impossible for this film, beyond what we already know of J.K. Rowling's rich magical world.
It does look like the surname "Graves" has been featured in the Harry Potter universe before. Apparently, the cellist for The Weird Sisters, a popular wizard/witch band in Harry Potter's day (they rocked out at the Yule Ball, as you may remember) is named Merton Graves. So it's possible he's the descendant of Farrell's character. Names tend not to be coincidental in J.K. Rowling's world. But even if this turns out to be true, the amount of information we know about Merton Graves could fit on a chocolate frog card. So other than speculating that Farrell's character might have some musical interests, there's still not much to go on.
These days, Colin Farrell's starring as one of the leads in HBO's True Detective (Season 2). On the feature side, he's starring in the upcoming thriller Solace.
Directed by David Yates, based on a script by J.K. Rowling, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them arrives in theaters November 18, 2016.
