The movie begins with the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (played by Mads Mikkelsen) slinking into a tearoom, his nose twitching. It is in this volatile climate that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the third in the Harry Potter spin-off series, is being released. What the Wizarding World wouldn’t give today for a controversy of that stripe: one that doesn’t result in lost revenue, accusations of hate speech, and the previously unimaginable spectacle of Vladimir Putin declaring that he knows how Rowling feels. In 2009, Matt Latimer, a former speech writer for George W Bush, claimed in his book Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor that the Harry Potter creator had been dropped from consideration for the presidential medal of freedom because of suspicions in the administration that her books “encouraged witchcraft”. H ow quaint it feels now to look back on the sort of low-level furore with which JK Rowling once had to contend.
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