Credit: Warner Bros.Jude Law, the star of the Harry Potter spinoff film series Fantastic Beasts, recently revealed one of the changes he brought to his character, a young Albus Dumbledore.
Law starred in the second and third films in the series, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022). Although Warner Bros. canceled any future developments in the Harry Potter prequel series as reviews plummeted, Law fondly recalled his time with the films during a recent video interview with Variety.
During the interview, Law read this Dumbledore line: “The fact that everything didn’t go precisely to plan was precisely the plan.” Then, he revealed that it wasn’t part of the original script.
“Ah! I’ve got a good story about this line,” the actor said. “I wrote this line! I just thought that it was very Dumbledore.”
Law shared that he’d always had a special connection with Harry Potter, having read the books to his children. He always saw Professor Dumbledore as the “spirit” of the series.
“He was absolutely the sort of heartbeat of those books,” Law said. “Or, rather, the spirit. Harry was the heartbeat. There was something in the heart of Dumbledore — there was something in the spirit of the man that I really liked. And, in fact, playing him put me in a very good place.”
J.K. Rowling, who some have blamed for the dwindling success of Fantastic Beasts and other Harry Potter projects because of her vocal anti-transgender rhetoric, reportedly told Law that Dumbledore saw himself as a “monster.”
“Jo Rowling always said to me that he saw himself as a monster because of the way he had behaved in the past, and he was always trying to forgive himself, but I just always felt like he was a good, kind man,” the actor said. “… It’s nice playing good, kind men.”
Law starred in two Fantastic Beasts films alongside Eddie Redmayne (Newt Scamander) and Mads Mikkelsen (Gellert Grindelwald). Dumbledore, who fell in love with Grindelwald in their youth, could not fight the villainous wizard because of a childhood blood pact. He tasked Scamander and his friends with defeating his former friend.
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