Jon Voight enters wizarding world for Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts

October 5th 2015, 3:54pm

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

If you really want some magic in your new corner of Harry Potter’s wizarding world, you certainly could do a lot worse than adding Jon Voight to your cast.

So that’s precisely what director David Yates did, adding the actor to the Potter spinoff FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM, although details of his role remain under wraps. (I’d hope he’d be a villain of some sorts, because… hello… this is Jon Voight we’re talking about.)

Voight, along with Gemma Chan and Carmen Ejogo, become the latest crop of actors to sign onto the film based on a textbook students use during their years at Hogwarts throughout the Harry Potter series. J.K. Rowling herself is indeed penning the screenplay for this new entry into the overall wizarding universe, with Eddie Redmayne starring as the magizoologist Newt Scamander who will be at the heart of this new thread of stories. They will be taking place some 70 years before Harry Potter ever set foot into the wizarding world, so fans of the first eight movies (and the seven books that they stemmed from) shouldn’t expect any sort of larger crossover. However, continuity should be a big thing with Yates returning to direct, given his history with the Potter series of films. I would anticipate FANTASTIC BEASTS feeling like a Potter movie in many respects.