Eddie Redmayne is ready to make his mark on the world of Harry Potter with his leading role in next year’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It turns out, however, that he would have been much happier with a smaller role, if he’d had an opportunity to be in the film series much earlier. He feels like he was the only actor in England that was never called to be in the movies, and he thinks he would have been perfect. Or at least his hair was.
Eddie Redmayne says that he really wanted to be a member of the Weasley family during the original Harry Potter film series. He thought he’d be perfect since there were already so many redheads in the movies, he’d fit in perfectly.
For years I was always like, in the Harry Potter films, there was a whole ginger family, and I never got an audition. And I was like, come on, it's outrageous! Every actor in England was in the Harry Potter films, but I never got the call.
We can understand Redmayne’s frustration, which he vented to IGN. He’s not too far off the mark that "every actor in England" was in those movies. Over the course of eight films based on seven novels, some of them quite extensive, the Harry Potter ensembles made for a world full of characters. We honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d looked back and discovered Eddie Redmayne was in the films in some small capacity that we missed the first time around. Redmayne is five years older than Rupert Grint who portrayed primary Weasley character Ron, so that role would probably not have worked, and he’s not a twin, so there’s that, but he probably could have been a perfectly good Bill or Percy. It could’ve worked.
However, now instead of becoming a trivia question (Which Oscar winner was once a Weasley brother?) Eddie Redmayne gets to star as Newt Scamander in the spinoff movie set for the end of 2016. The film is set in 1920’s America and deals with Redmayne’s character’s attempts to capture magical creatures while keeping their existence a secret from those non-magical folks. Check out the first trailer below.
Did the producers of Harry Potter miss the boat in never calling Eddie Redmayne to read for a Weasley, or is this a case of everything working out for the best?
