Jude Law’s turn as young(ish) Dumbledore is one of the key selling points of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. With the film showing the rise to power of Dark Wizard Gellert Grindelwald, his former friend and lover Albus Dumbledore is set to play an important role in flashbacks to Newt Scamander’s time at Hogwarts and in his adventures in Paris and London. But now it transpires that another much-loved Harry Potter character will also be making a return.
According to a new report, we’ll be meeting a young version of future Headmistress of Hogwarts, Minerva McGonagall, in the movie, as played by Irish actress Fiona Glascott. You might think that this makes a good deal of sense. After all, she looked pretty old in the Harry Potter films so clearly there’d be a younger version of her knocking about Hogwarts in the 20s, right? Well, the thing is, official Harry Potter canon states that McGonagall was born in 1935 and only enrolled in Hogwarts in 1947.
This either means that this report’s wrong or possibly that we’re going to get a bit of a retcon in Fantastic Beasts 2. Given that the script was written by J.K. Rowling and she has a pretty tight hold on continuity in the Potterverse, if she does do this she’s probably going to have a damn good reason. Of course, there’s always a chance that McGonagall could be seen in some kind of flash-forward (perhaps a vision of a dark future where Grindelwald triumphs), but right now, that seems pretty unlikely.
Plus, if she’s only playing a minor role in this movie, it could open the door for Glascott’s McGonagall to take more of a central role in future Fantastic Beasts films. Either way, we’ll know the answer soon enough, as the pic opens in cinemas on November 21st – I’ll see you there.
