Fantastic Beasts addresses Dumbledore’s sexuality onscreen
"Dumbledore" by the-specious is marked with CC BY 2.0.
In this week’s edition of Cinema Summaries, Andrew takes a look at the newest details regarding one of Harry Potter’s most loved characters.
April 20, 2022
The Harry Potter film franchise has never explicitly stated the sexuality of its characters, only going so far as to depict its characters in almost conventionally straight relationships, if they are in a relationship at all. However, in the latest film, Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore, the titular Dumbledore is revealed to have been in love with the film’s villain: Grindelwald.
While Harry Potter author JK Rowling has said for many years that the character was gay, nothing has ever been done to depict this as part of the Potter canon until now. In the latest film, the love Dumbledore shared with Grindelwald in their youth motivated them to create a spell that kept them from doing harm to one another, which forces Dumbledore to ask the Fantastic Beasts characters to act against Grindelwald on his behalf.
Unlike some other depictions in films, the representation of a homosexual character doesn’t feel like an unnessary detail that only exists to sell more tickets to the LGBT audience, but an important plot and character detail that naturally adds to the story. Additionally Jude Law, Dumbledore, and Mads Mikkelsen, Grindelwald, have fantastic chemistry together, more than selling to the audience that there is or was a love between them.
While some are upset that a character that they previously assumed to be straight isn’t, in reality it isn’t a big deal. While it is nice to see some representation that doesn’t feel like pandering, I am hopeful that soon that it won’t be worth commenting on at all.
