15 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets About "Fantastic Beasts" According To The Cast Themselves

Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, and Katherine Waterston spilled some secrets on their first days of filming and a scene that didn't make the final cut.

Ever since the first Fantastic Beasts film came out in 2016, we've been eagerly waiting to see what Newt and his friends will get up to in the rest of the series.

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Now the second film in the franchise — Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald — has finally arrived, and it's delving even further into J.K. Rowling's wizarding world.

When BuzzFeed got the chance to speak with some of the cast — Eddie Redmayne (Newt), Katherine Waterston (Tina), and Jude Law (Dumbledore) — in London recently, we decided it'd be the perfect opportunity to get them to spill some behind-the-scenes secrets about Fantastic Beasts films.

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Here's what they revealed...

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1. Jude Law first learned about the wizarding world after his stepson talked to him about Quidditch, and he thought it was a real game.

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"My lovely stepson, who back then would’ve been about five years old, kept talking to me about this game called Quidditch, and I thought it was a real game," Jude laughed. "He kept describing it, and it wasn’t until he mentioned broomsticks that I was like, 'What?!'"

2. The plot is kept so secret that the cast only got to see the script for the first time a few weeks before they started filming.

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Eddie Redmayne revealed the cast are kept in the dark just like the rest of us: "We just don’t know what’s coming. Occasionally when Jo came to set on the first one, we’d get snippets and ideas — we had a sense of where it was going to be set. But you literally sit down and take it in, and I drank it up. I found my jaw on the floor, and I had to go back over it and try to tie all these things together."

3. Katherine Waterston was in LA working on another job when she got the script, and she dropped everything to read it.

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"I was in Los Angeles — I was working on something else — and it came in, and I had other work I should’ve been doing but I just dropped everything," Katherine said of the first time she saw the script. "I mean, it’s so exciting, you know. We’re only a few months ahead of the rest of the world with this stuff, because there isn’t a series of books."

4. According to Jude Law, reading a script from J.K. Rowling was like nothing he'd ever experienced before as an actor.

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"It’s the first time I’ve ever read a script and then had to go back and think, 'Hold on, this is a film,'" he told BuzzFeed. "The world I was already invested in, the references were all references to books I’ve read and films I’ve seen, so it was a kind of unique experience. I had to go back then and look at it from an actor point of view."

5. Eddie was so nervous on the first day of filming the first Fantastic Beasts that they had to stop production because he sweated so much.

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"It was a scene with Katherine and Dan, in which this Murtlap bursts out of the case," he remembered. "I was so nervous — I was wearing all these layers of tweed, and it was summer — that I sweated so much they basically had to stop filming, bring in an air conditioner, and blast it only at me. Everyone else was wearing coats, and everyone else was fine. It actually genuinely brings me out in hives just thinking about it."

6. Jude started filming his scenes four or five weeks into the production, but still had to come to set for beard-length fittings.

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"I think they’d done at least four, five weeks," he said of his first time filming. "I got to come in during that time to have costume fittings and beard-length fittings and all sorts of things."

7. The first thing Jude Law filmed for Crimes of Grindelwald was the first look we get of Dumbledore in all the trailers.

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When he found out that was the first thing Jude filmed, Eddie said he would find that "quite stressful".

8. Eddie's first scene for Crimes of Grindelwald was a challenge, because he had to convey emotion while staring directly into the camera lens.

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It's the audience's first time seeing Leta Lestrange, and director David Yates had Eddie and Zoë Kravitz look into camera to give the impression that they're looking at each other.

"We’re meant to be showing this whole history of a relationship, staring straight down the barrel of a lens," Eddie told BuzzFeed. "I found it really hard. We had to do about 900 takes."

9. Eddie learned to hold his breath for extended periods of time in order to film a scene underwater.

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Eddie revealed he was sent to meet a freediver — who "could hold her breath for about 25 minutes" — in order to film a scene where he's underwater riding a creature called a Kelpie.

"She taught me to zen out and become really chilled and it was amazing — over like a day, she managed to extend my breath patterns, which I was so smug about," he explained.

10. But the scene ended up being very short in the final cut of the film, because he forgot all his training when he got to set.

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"I said to David, 'Don’t worry, we can do 20 minute takes, I’ve got this!' And then of course, what I didn’t realise was that film sets are the most hardcore, quite intense places. The point is, to be able to hold your breath that long, you have to be in an incredibly zen place. I could hold it for about three seconds, that’s why it’s a very short scene," Eddie laughed.

11. While the rest of the cast had wand movement training on the first film, Jude Law didn't because he didn't know it was available.

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"He wasn’t offered. I guess when you’re playing Dumbledore, they’re like, 'You must know,'" Katherine joked.

12. But he did carry a stick around with him for an entire summer in order to get used to holding a wand.

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"I carried a wand-length piece of wood — a twig, basically — around with me for a whole summer in preparation," Jude revealed. "I just wanted to get used to having this thing and playing with it."

13. There was a scene where Leta and Tina team up to protect Newt and his case against some particularly malicious creatures, but it ended up being cut from the film.

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"There was a really wonderful moment where Newt and Tina and Leta are running away from these things called Matagots — they’re spirit familiars, they’re cats — in the French Ministry," Eddie revealed. "Newt’s case falls out of his hand, and Tina jumps down to protect it, and then these cats are coming for Newt and Leta beats the living hell out of them. I actually saw a cut that had that, and it was pretty freaking cool, and it was cut for time."

14. Jude would love to see a young Tom Riddle make a small appearance in a future Fantastic Beasts film.

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We know Tom Riddle was born in 1926 — meaning he would've gone to Hogwarts in 1937 — and the Fantastic Beasts story will end in 1945, so the timeline definitely works out.

"It’d be amazing to have Tom Riddle appear as a little boy," he said. "To see him at Hogwarts, being taught by Dumbledore — even if it was just in passing, this little kid bullying someone else, or sitting in a corner. That would be amazing."

15. And given that Eddie Redmayne auditioned for the part of a young Tom Riddle in the original films, he thinks that would bring the whole thing full circle.

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"I auditioned — and very, very badly failed — for the part of Tom Riddle," Eddie joked. "I think it would be the one moment, if Tom Riddle were to walk past Newt at Hogwarts, that Newt wouldn’t be quite so nice any more."

Thanks for chatting with us, guys! Catch Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in cinemas worldwide now.