Now You See Me 2: Is Harry Potter the new Thaddeus Bradley?

staff@ew.com (Natalie Abrams)
Updated
Daniel Radcliffe is terrible at magic in Now You See Me 2

Warning: This story contains spoilers from Now You See Me and the upcoming sequel.

Harry Potter may be the bad guy this time around!

In the sequel to surprise 2013 film Now You See Me, the Four Horsemen — J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and newcomer Lula (Lizzy Caplan) — are exploited by a tech prodigy, Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe), who threatens the magical quartet into pulling off a dangerous heist.

But despite coming off as an inept magician in the first trailer, “There’s definitely more than meets the eye,” Chu tells EW of Radcliffe’s character. “He’s not an idiot. He really loves magic. He was probably a kid who did magic all the time and was obsessed with it and somehow made a fool of himself or it just didn’t work out for him. He’s gone the other way. He knows all the different magic tricks of all different people and figured out how they all work. In fact, in his [home], you’ll see that he’s torn up all the famous magic tricks to figure out how it works in almost this grotesque way that he’s picked apart everything, and studied the Horsemen, and knows how they do everything, and has created this journey for them so that they can’t escape.”

Sound familiar? For uninitiated Now You See Me fans, the first film revealed Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) was a former magician scorned over not being invited to join The Eye — an ancient organization of magicians. To retaliate, he set out to destroy the group by debunking their magic tricks, starting with Lionel Shrike, the father of Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Rhodes. Shrike, however, perished when his stunt involving an escape from a safe at the bottom of a river went wrong, setting Rhodes’ revenge plot in motion. ( More on that here.)

Is Walter now seeking revenge for what the Horsemen did to his (maybe) father in the original film? Though Chu is staying mum on Walter’s parentage, cast member Michael Caine, who returns for the sequel, let slip in 2014 that Radcliffe would be playing his son in Now You See Me 2. The insurance company owned by Caine’s character, Arthur Tressler, refused to pay the claim to Shrike’s family since his body was never found, which is why the Four Horsemen helped Rhodes rob Tressler of millions (and put Thaddeus in jail). Seems like a plausible reason for Walter to want his own revenge.

We’ll find out exactly what Walter and Thaddeus have in store for the Four Horsemen when Now You See Me 2 hits theaters on June 10. In the meantime, watch the new trailer and get more scoop on the sequel here.