Victoria Yeates Talks Rowdy Nifflers and Filming “Secrets of Dumbledore” While Pregnant
We all love Newt Scamander’s trusty assistant in Fantastic Beasts, Bunty Broadacre, and the actress who portrays her is perfect for the role, in our opinion. Victoria Yeates seems to enjoy playing Bunty as much as we love watching her do it.
There’s no arguing that Yeates is a fantastic actress, but what gives her extra brownie points is the fact that she filmed Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore while she was pregnant. In fact, she’s 37 weeks pregnant in some of the scenes. You can credit the folks behind the scenes if you didn’t notice it during the movie. Speaking to Never Was, Yeates said that the costume department did an incredible job of hiding her baby bump.
Obviously, the coat is covering quite a bit, but on top of that, they cut it on the base, so it basically kinda stretched with my bump. They also shaded it with spray paint to help [with] hiding the baby bump, so you couldn’t see it. I’ve also used the suitcase to cover my little bump.
Yeates is just as fond of Bunty as we are, and she spent quite a bit of time discussing her character with director David Yates before they started filming Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Yeates really wanted to establish her character so that there was room for growth in future films, and by the time she stepped foot onto the Crimes of Grindelwald set, she knew exactly who Bunty was at that moment in time. For Secrets of Dumbledore, Yeates spoke a lot with Eddie Redmayne about her character, and they had some inspiring conversations.
Eddie is very generous as an actor. We would talk a lot. As well as with David, just to make sure I wouldn’t come out of character. She’s very sort of understated and shy. And it was nice to have these moments where you saw that slight zaniness come out. Having that little bit of spark come out was important to me.
We definitely saw that spark, and to Yeates, creating good characters is more important when it comes to creating a great story than a slew of special effects. She’s also been impressed with how involved Yates is when it comes to the actors and their characters.
He’ll talk to you a lot. He’s very, very involved; it’s really great. He’s a lovely, lovely man.
Yeates has high aspirations for Bunty and believes there’s a lot more to explore about the character in future films.
Hopefully, we’ll get to make another movie, because I’m interested to see where the little bits of her that have started coming out [in] this movie will lead. There’s a lot more to uncover about the character. The different sides of her.
Yeates would like to see Bunty be a little more rambunctious, as she puts it. In fact, there’s a scene that shows another side of Bunty that ended up being deleted.
There’s a deleted scene where she really tells off Teddy [Newt’s niffler]. I think that people often forget that she has a hard, physical job. She spends hours and hours each day looking after terrifying animals. And has to wrangle them. So there is a strenght [sic] to her.
One last thing Yeates would love for her character to experience is love. She would like to see Bunty in a relationship and have a love story that’s all her own. There’s nothing we’d like more.
When asked what she would do if she could spend one day with Bunty, Yeates’s answer was simple: She’d take Bunty shopping and encourage her to let her hair down a little, after which she would love to spend some time with all the fantastic beasts Bunty cares for. We can’t think of a day more perfect than that.
