Gellert Grindelwald will change his face, for the third time, in Fantastic Animals 3. If in the first installment he was played for almost all the footage by Colin Farrell to, in a final twist of the script, reveal the true appearance of the villain, that of Johnny Depp, in this third the character will change actor again, in this case for reasons unrelated to history.
Mads Mikkelsen replaces Depp, forced to withdraw from the project due to his legal problems with his ex-wife Amber Heard, and the Danish actor, star of the acclaimed series Hannibal and films such as The Hunt or the recently Oscar-winning Another Round, sheds some light on how He faces this tremendous challenge and how, despite Depp’s shadow and his controversial departure being lengthened, he hopes to make the role his own.
“Nobody wants me to go there and try to copy anything, that would be an instant creative suicide, especially when it has been done before and masterfully. So we all want to find a different path,” says Mikkelsen in an interview with Collider in which, in any case, warns that in this third installment of the saga it will be necessary to build “a bridge” between what Depp’s Grindelwald and his incarnation of the villain.
“And that bridge must be found together, whether it be a certain aspect or a certain attitude in certain situations, but you have to make it yours. Anything else would simply be stupid from a creative point of view,” he says.
David Yates, who already directed the first two installments of these Harry Potter prequels, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), is also directing this third film that, with a script by JK Rowling and starring Eddie Redmayne (Newt Scamander) and Jude Law (Albus Dumbledore) alongside Mikkelsen will hit theaters on July 15, 2022.
