When it comes to making blockbuster movies, there are few things more important than managing spoilers. Major tentpole releases go to extreme lengths to try and avoid details being leaked out before they are ready. When it came to the newest of the Harry Potter movies, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Eddie Redmayne thought that the film’s opening had been spoiled thanks to overzealous media, but details remained hidden because the leaked images were mistaken for the Batcave.
Speaking with IMDb’s Burning Questions, Eddie Redmayne was asked about the toughest scene to film in the new Fantastic Beasts movie. He discusses a scene that he spent largely submerged in water, in December. It was a tough scene to film but it was also nearly given away, as the set was apparently photographed by a drone flying overhead. Luckily, the people getting the pictures actually had no idea what they had shot. Redmayne explains…
For me, it was one of the opening moments of the film and I ended up having to lie in this lake during a night shoot in December and I think it was the coldest I’ve ever been. What was hilarious about that though is that the sets, which are all super top secret, were filmed by a drone that came over and they were in all the newspapers and I was so upset because I didn’t want our sets to be given away but the great news is they thought it was the Bat Cave (from The Batman) and so I was like ‘oh great!! They have no idea.’
To be fair, since The Batman and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore were both filming around the same time, The Batman did also film in the U.K. it would be easy to assume that the water and rocky structure that was seen in the pictures were the exterior of the Batcave. We know now that The Batman’s Batcave was more of a basement than an actual cave, but we didn’t know that at the time.
The good news is that since people got it wrong, they didn’t know anything about the Fantastic Beasts 3 opening sequence, at least not until now when Eddie Redmayne revealed it. The film has been released in many countries overseas but is only now opening domestically. That’s not to say we didn’t already know about the scene in question, even if we hadn’t seen the set. Redmayne spoke a bit about the water shoot before he filmed it, and how the pandemic delay in filming the new Fantastic Beasts moved what would have been a summer shoot into December.
You can now go see the scene in question and everything else as well, as Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is now in theaters.