Fantastic Beasts: 10 Ties To Doctor Who You Might Have Missed

Eddie Redmayne has made no secret of the fact that he would love to play the Doctor, and his interpretation of Newt Scamander certainly gives him a Doctorish quality. Reminiscent of Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor with his mannerisms and gait, the likeness is made all the stronger on account of the bow ties that both characters sport.

We have already seen how the two characters share similar worldviews when it comes to loving the alien, but that isn’t the half of it. They are unconventional heroes who eschew the traditional notion of the action hero, preferring to negotiate rather than steam in all guns (wands, sonic screwdrivers) blazing. The touching scene when Newt offers to sit and listen to the scared and cowering Credence, is exactly what the Doctor would have done.

In the Matt Smith episode, Night Terrors, the Doctor comforts a young boy called George who is scared of monsters. It turns out that George is himself an alien. Frightened of being rejected by his human adoptive parents, George created the monsters himself. It taps into a repeated moral in Doctor Who - that listening to the misunderstood is the best way to overcome the darkness (eg. The God Complex, Time Heist).

There is a sense that both Newt and the Doctor devote their energies into saving others as a way of escaping from their own past. When asked about their background they are reticent to talk. But the little we do know is remarkably similar – both of them have been punished by their own people for their unconventional ways, with Newt expelled from Hogwarts and the Doctor exiled on Earth (at least for a time), and both have lost somebody they loved.

The Doctor and Newt are characters who do not fit in with the society around them. In the screenplay Rowling describes Newt’s disconnect from New York: “Watching Newt walk, we see in him an unselfconscious Keatonesque quality, a sense of a different rhythm to those around him.” Compare this to the Ninth Doctor explaining to Rose how as a Time lord he senses the world differently: “The first time they tell you that the world’s turning and you just can’t quite believe it because everything looks like it’s standing still. I can feel it.”

This correspondence is strongest when in the 1996 TV Movie the Doctor, like Newt, comes to America and his eccentricity is repeatedly mistaken for being British. In both cases, the British stereotype is a conceit to highlight their set-apart-ness.