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“Never say never again” might be the informal Scottish national motto.
It was the winking title of the 1983 James Bond movie that brought Sean Connery back for one more spin as the title character 12 years after Diamonds are Forever.
And now in an interview with Matt Lauer on Today, J.K. Rowling teases, “I have always said never say never” about an eighth Harry Potter book. She adds, “I’ve always said I’m not going to say ‘I definitely won’t’ because — because I don’t see why I should say that. You know, it’s my world and I might choose to step back into it. I’m stepping back into that world, writing the script for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
But before you get to excited, she continued with, “But I think Harry Potter 8, as in what happened next to Harry, Ron and Hermione — I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Rowling, who often playfully engages fans on Twitter, proved she knows how the Internet works: “I know that someone’s cutting this on YouTube to make it as though I gave you hope.” (Even Lauer chuckled that he saw the answer as giving hope.)
The author has been writing the script for the first (of three) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movies, which is scheduled to be released on Nov. 18, 2016. The movie is based on the 2001 companion book to the Harry Potter series that cataloged an array of magical creatures.
The film will focus on Newton Scamander (the putative author), and at least some of it will take place in New York in 1920. Casting announcements and filming should begin sometime later in 2015.
Rowling is in New York to promote Lumos, a new charity for children in orphanages. She said the inspiration for the organization came from the time she saw a photo of a boy who appeared to be caged. She admitted she wanted to look away, and that made her ashamed of herself.
The charity is named after the light-giving spell in the Potter-verse. Rowling said the meaning of the name was two-fold: To bring the problem to light and also to bring light to the lives of these children.
See the interview below:
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