Inside a ritzy New York department store, all hell is breaking loose. Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) has just slid across the floor at breakneck speed. Her sister, Queenie (Alison Sudol), is cowering in a storeroom, a silver punch bowl atop her head (photo above). And next to her is baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), limbs flailing. Despite all the evidence, Empire is not watching the Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them characters navigate a clearance sale, but a situation even more stressful. Magical creatures have escaped throughout the city, and several have ended up here, causing havoc with the Christmas displays.

“There’s a lot of mayhem happening,” confirms Sudol when the scene is wrapped, bowl now removed from bonce. Fogler is more forthcoming. “At that moment I was being crushed by a tentacle-beast,” he explains with a grin. “It’s a very large creature which eats bugs,so Newt has told us to round up something for it to eat. I come from theatre and I love this stuff.”

The Newt in question is magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the hero of this feverishly anticipated 1920s-set Harry Potter spin-off. He and his trio of pals are faced with the formidable task of rounding up the critters accidentally unleashed from his suitcase, before Central Park turns into an enchanted safari park.

Redmayne, who has been watching the department-store chaos from the sidelines, admits to having struggled with the fact said critters are absent from the set. “We did some work before we started shooting on the scale of the animals,” he says. “I’d stand against a big white screen and they were projected next to me. It was useful, because I have a bit of a shoddy imagination!”

One person with too good an imagination: director David Yates, who found the menagerie invading not just the Big Apple but his downtime. “I direct in my sleep,” the Potter veteran laughs, “and my wife kills me ’cause sometimes I go, ‘No, no, no, we have to go wider… I’ll find another shot…’” Why count sheep when you can count beasts?

Ezra Miller: ‘So I’d heard about the part, and remember that to me – someone who got into Harry Potter so young, as a fan – I thought this was a universe that had been closed to me forever. I thought we’d had everything we’d ever get from that world, I thought it was over. I spent years devastated that I wasn’t in that world, that I wasn’t in those movies. I would say, “I can do British, I promise!”’

‘And then, to hear that J.K. Rowling had expanded that universe. That there was more and that there was this character… I almost couldn’t believe it.’

‘I improvise this character and I get a call two days later from David Yates. By then, I had become so invested in that character and, if you look back at those tapes, I had already become Credence. There is so much of what I’ve done as Credence that just came to me that day.’

‘At that stage I’d already signed up to become [DC Comics character] The Flash and there were serious scheduling issues. For a while it looked like I wouldn’t be able to do this movie.’

‘So I’m thinking about the part, I’m dreaming about it, I want it and I know deep down that I will do anything for it. So I start emailing Warner Bros. and I say, “Look at Humphrey Bogart!”'