In an interview to the Empire magazine, [David Yates], director of Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald, explained how Dumbledore’s homosexuality will be portrayed in the movie.
“This part of this huge narrative that Jo [[Rowling]] is creating doesn’t focus on his sexuality, but we’re not airbrushing or hiding it,” he said. “The story [of the romantic relationship] isn’t there in this particular movie but it’s clear in what you see… that he is gay.”
“A couple of scenes we shot are very sensual moments of him and the young Grindelwald. I think people just have to wait and see and appreciate that in movies to come that relationship will be explored much more fully”, he added.
In January this year, there was a controversy with the character’s sexuality, when the director said to Entertainment Weekly that Dumbledore would not be “explicitly homossexual” in this movie. The statement brought negative repercussions online, some people accused J.K. Rowling – the movie screenwriter – of queerbaiting, a script practice in which same-gender characters have some implicit romantic or sexual attraction, with the screenwriters not intending to concretize the attraction.
J.K. Rowling answered to the critics. “Being sent abuse about an interview that didn’t involve me, about a screenplay I wrote but which none of the angry people have read, which is part of a five-movie series that’s only one instalment in, is obviously tons of fun”, she wrote on Twitter
With Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterson, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler, Jude Law and Johnny Depp, Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald opens worldwide on November 16th, 2018.
Translated into English by Nuara Costa
Edited by Aline Michel
