‘Fantastic Beasts’ Pictures Of Eddie Redmayne And Plot Details Emerge

The first official pictures of Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander in Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, have emerged, along with new details on the film’s plot.

Check out Redmayne in full wizard mode, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, below.

The pictures, to be published in the magazine’s coming issue, clearly demonstrate the crew taking full advantage of the film’s 1920s New York setting, recreating the sights and style of the era perfectly.

The film was penned by J.K. Rowling herself and is to be the first in a planned trilogy. It is the author’s first-ever screenplay and is based on the 2001 book of the same name that appears in the Harry Potter series as one of his textbooks.

The new trilogy centers around the adventures of the fictional author of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, Newt Scamander (Radmayne), a magizoologist who travels the globe in search of creatures both fantastical and fierce. That was as much as we’d known about the plot up until now but EW has managed to get the scoop on more concrete details.

Scamander comes to New York, with his trusty weathered case, for reasons we don’t yet know. “This case is one of those way-way-way-bigger-on-the-inside magical devices, and within are expansive habitats for a collection of rare and endangered magical creatures from Newt’s travels around the globe,” EW reports, “Fantastic Beasts is the story of what happens when this uniquely skilled English wizard travels to wiz-phobic America and a variety of his creatures, some quite dangerous … get out of their case.”

The film, directed by Harry Potter alum, David Yates, is due out Nov. 18, 2015.