Fantastic Beasts star Dan Fogler ready to cast a new spell on Harry Potter fans

Dan Fogler knows himself to be on the brink of a major life change. "I walk down the street in New York and a few people will shout out: 'Balls of Fury guy!' Sometimes they'll just shout 'Balls!' I'm hoping now they'll shout 'Fantastic!' That would be nice. Ha ha!"

Fogler, a gregarious New Yorker with a big beard and a throaty laugh, has been in and about the entertainment industry for 20 years. Over the past decade, he's been earning a very decent living as a voiceover artist and supporting player. He's had recurring roles on The Good Wife and Hannibal. You can hear him in Kung Fu Panda and Free Birds. The closest thing he had to a breakthrough role was his turn in top ping-pong comedy Balls of Fury.

The situation is about to alter. “It’s weird,” he chortles. “I do feel a bit as if a light shone down on me and a great voice said: ‘It’s you!’”

As you can't fail to know, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a spin-off from the Harry Potter series. Expanded from a fictional encyclopaedia that JK Rowling wrote for charity, the film follows Newt Scamander, a young wizard, as he pursues the titular creatures through New York City of the 1920s.

Eddie Redmayne takes the lead. Katherine Waterston and Colin Farrell are also about the place. Fogler, front and centre on the poster, has been plucked from modest renown to play Jacob Kowalski, a baker who becomes Newt’s chief sidekick.

“I auditioned for it and I felt really good,” he says. “Then I didn’t hear a thing. I read in the trades [trade publications] that all these people were reading for it. But they called me back for a screen test. I met Eddie. We had great chemistry. And I felt that I was playing my great-great grandfather.”

Jacob is a baker who gets flung into the magical world after a chance encounter with Newt.

“My great-great grandfather was a baker in New York City. He ran Fogler’s Pumpernickel on the lower East Side. So, I felt like I was transported back in time. I felt like I’d jumped into his body in a quantum leap. I knew all the names of the streets. It was very emotional to me.”

An industry within an industry
Of course, most of the delicious sets were imagined in computers or recreated in Warner Brothers' studios in Leavesden, Hertfordshire. That enormous complex was essentially built by and for the Harry Potter franchise. Potter is an industry within an industry. In these strange times for the film business – when a handful of films make almost all the dosh – the Leavesden property gestures back to glory days.

“It’s astonishing,” Fogler says. “They built half of New York. When you get to Leavesden they have these aircraft hangers. They have nine of them, I think. And each one houses three or four huge movies.

"We're doing Fantastic Beasts, which is huge, next to Justice League, which is huge. We have Jon Voight in our film and he's saying: 'Oh my God! They built New York in 1929!' When the legend is saying that then, you know, it's okay to be freaked out."

Moving from the back room to the front, JK Rowling has written her first ever screenplay. There have been suggestions that the author lurked over producers to ensure that the Potter films did not deviate too far from her own stories. In this case, the source does not really have any sort of plot to protect.

“Surprisingly, they let me play around quite a lot,” he says. “Because nobody knew who these characters were, we had a little bit of legroom to play around.

“They were open to suggestions because it didn’t come from a novel and they took the suggestions. That’s the best-case scenario for an actor. I initially thought I’m going to treat it like Shakespeare. But I can’t keep my mouth shut. Once I have an idea, I have to express it.”

So, what did he make of Rowling?

“I met her three or four times and each time was absolutely thrilling,” he says. “She has this energy to share these stories and characters that have been percolating for so long and now she has a chance to do that.”

As Dan had mentioned, his family came over from Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Part of a Jewish wave that gave Brooklyn its zesty, international character, the Foglers grew and prospered. It sounds as if there is a great American novel to be written about his father alone.

"My dad wanted to be an actor and he went to the 'Fame school': The New York School of Performing Arts. He got to sophomore year and my grandparents came in and he said: 'What do you think?' And they said: 'You are going to be a doctor.' Who knows if he would have been any good? But when I came along and wanted to be an actor, he said: 'I am going to support this guy.'"

Character actor
Some supporting was required. Fogler excelled as an actor at school and at Boston University College but, upon graduation, he received both good news and bad news from agents. He was a "character actor" and convention had it that such performers don't work much until they close in on 40. "I started working in my later 20s and I proved them wrong," he says.

Five films are projected in the Fantastic Beasts series. It's hard to imagine the first movie failing. So Dan has a tasty earner in place for years to come. How quickly things change.

He recalls being at Comic-Con International: San Diego when the news came in. "I'd gone to Comic-Con and I had this comic book I was selling at the time," he says. "I had stacks of these comics and I am hauling them upstream like the Hunchback of Notre Dame through throngs of costumed people. I get this phone call from my manager and she says: 'Comic-Con is going to be a lot different next year.'"