In a recent appearance on Live with Kelly and Ryan, actor Eddie Redmayne discussed how he tried to score some brownie points with his two children, ages four and five, using his wizard skills from the Fantastic Beasts movies, but they were unimpressed.
Redmayne first tried to dazzle his daughter with a gift. He shared:
“I gave Iris, my daughter, Newt’s wand. Which I thought was pretty exciting, and she’s like ‘Okay, thanks Dad.’ I came back an hour later and she covered the thing in tinfoil, she’d made a little star and made a fairy wand. And she’s like, ‘Now this is a wand.’ [That] slightly undermined my brownie points.”
Undeterred, he tried to win over his son with a magic trick. Redmayne stated:
“So I said ‘Yeah I am a wizard’ and I did some sort of trick with a coin, the one magic trick I could do. And he’s like, ‘That’s not the kind of stuff you can do in the [Fantastic Beasts] trailer. In the trailer, you can make stuff explode. So I think he told his friends at school and they asked me to do some of the stuff in the trailer and it was a bit of a letdown.”
Parenthood is hard, even for actors who play famous wizards. Redmayne plays Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, which is an extension of the Harry Potter wizarding world. The Fantastic Beasts movies are a prequel to the Harry Potter stories, and take place in the 1920s. They tell the story of Scamander, a Magizoologist, as he joins forces with other wizards, such as Albus Dumbledore, to fight the dark wizard Grindelwald. The most recent film in the series, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, will be released in theaters on April 14. Perhaps that will impress Redmayne’s children.