The Secret To A Successful Sequel? It's A Secret

SWEARING THE ENTIRE CAST AND CREW OF A FILM TO secrecy is hard. But when it’s a massive movie like Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, with some 700 people and 1,000 costumes—including 400 coats alone—it’s next to impossible. All precautions are taken: characters are given code names, minute details are protected by nondisclosure agreements, and digital scripts are encrypted and disappear after a certain amount of time. It’s not quite magic, but it’s close.

- Kate Samuelson

The pressure to not reveal anything—even by accident—is enough to give Eddie Redmayne heart palpitations. “I’ve been sent this hilarious document which is covered with double-caps, triple-underlined notes saying, YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT THIS,” says the Oscar winner, who returns as wizard Newt Scamander in the sequel, out Nov. 16. We’re sitting in his spotless trailer at Warner Bros. Studio in Hertfordshire, just north of London, around three months into production. Does he ever tell anyone? He leans in and admits, a little bashfully, that he does: his wife, Hannah Bagshawe.

It certainly helps that J.K. Rowling is the master of keeping secrets. She famously claims to have known crucial plot points from her best-selling book series’ endgame years in advance. And Johnny Depp’s controversial casting—the actor has been accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife Amber Heard—as the dark wizard Grindelwald was kept under wraps until just two weeks before the first film came out in 2016.