Eddie Redmayne ripped his pants doing Fantastic Beasts' Erumpent mating dance: 'My arse was on show'

There isn't a spell in the world that could remove Eddie Redmayne's embarrassing experience on the set of the first Fantastic Beasts film from his mind.

The actor, who stars as the magnanimous magizoologist Newt Scamander in the Harry Potter spin-off series, revealed that he's still cringing over the events that unfolded while he was shooting the 2016 movie's infamous Erumpent mating dance scene.

"It was humiliating anyway, but I managed to rip my trousers," Redmayne told British Vogue as part of their 2023 Hollywood Portfolio. "My arse was on show for everyone to see on a night shoot in the middle of Watford."

In the film, Newt and his no-maj pal Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) discover that an Erumpent — a massive, glowing-headed creature that resembles a rhinoceros — has invaded a New York City zoo and is attempting to get cozy with a hippopotamus. In order to safely capture the beast, Newt (naturally) douses himself with Erumpent musk and begins performing an elaborate ritual in which he snorts, squats, and shakes his butt — just about the worst time that anyone could have the seams on their pants give way.

Redmayne previously got candid about his mortifying experience "trying to seduce this huge, horny female magical creature" — and how he researched bird calls for it — while visiting The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon in 2016.

"I went and looked on, like, weird, random bird mating calls and I made a few videos that I would send to the director [David Yates]," he recalled. "They were the most humiliating things you've ever seen in your life."

Before teaching Fallon the film's hip-shaking routine, Redmayne asked the host about the tightness of his pants and joked that the ritual could very well be "catastrophic" for both of them. He was, no doubt, having horrible flashbacks to his on-set blunder the entire time.

Since then, Redmayne and Fallon have upheld a tradition of doing different Fantastic Beasts dances together on the show. Most recently, the pair performed the manticore dance seen in the franchise's 2022 installment, The Secrets of Dumbledore.

"On the first movie, they made me do a mating dance with basically a rhino, and then I came and taught it to you, which was wonderful to be able to throw the humiliation onto you," Redmayne joked on the show last May. "I feel like now, in each of these movies, they literally write something to humiliate me and when I read it, I go, 'That's horrendous but great because I get to teach it to Jimmy.'"

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