Alison Sudol Joins Eddie Redmayne in J.K. Rowling's FANTASTIC BEASTS

Warner Bros. has announced that singer-turned-actress Alison Sudol has beat out Dakota Fanning, Saoirse Ronan, and Lili Simmons to win the role of Queenie in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which is being directed by Potter veteran David Yates.

Sudol will play Queenie, the younger sister of Katherine Waterston's Tina. The two sisters are American witches who meet up with Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander when he comes to New York while searching for the titular fantastic beasts; he's a magizoologist who writes a book that eventually becomes required reading for Harry and his classmates at Hogwarts.

Sudol has appeared on the highly-acclaimed Amazon series Transparent and headlines the USA series Dig, but since I haven't seen either of those shows yet, I haven't had any experiences watching her work, so she's sort of a blank slate for me. Perhaps that was an attractive quality to the producers and why she beat out more established actresses: audiences won't approach her character with any baggage of famous prior roles like they might with Fanning and Ronan.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them arrives in theaters on November 18th, 2016.