
Age: 44
male
Edward John David Redmayne OBE (born 6 January 1982) is an English actor and model. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a British Academy Film Award. He began his professional acting career in West End theatre before making his screen debut in 1996 with guest television appearances. His first films were Like Minds (2006), The Good Shepherd (2006) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). On the stage, Redmayne starred in the productions of Red from 2009 to 2010 and Richard II from 2011 to 2012. The former won him the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Redmayne's film breakthrough came with the roles of Colin Clark in the biographical drama My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Marius Pontmercy in Tom Hooper's musical Les Misérables (2012). He garnered consecutive nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayals of physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (2014), and transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl (2015), winning for the former. In 2016, he began starring as Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts film series.

The story begins with our protagonist waking up inside a nautiloid, a dimension-crossing illithid flying ship. They are implanted with an illithid tadpole, parasites that enthral and transform people into creatures known as mind flayers; however, before the transformation is complete, the ship comes under attack from githyanki warriors and their red dragons. The protagonist is freed during the fighting and steers the damaged ship back to Faerûn, where it crashes. As the protagonist searches for a way to remove their parasite, they encounter other survivors of the wreck, all likewise implanted with tadpoles: the githyanki fighter Lae'zel, the Sharran cleric Shadowheart, the high elf vampire Astarion, the human wizard Gale, the human warlock Wyll, and the tiefling barbarian Karlach. Meanwhile a deadly cult which follows a mysterious entity called the Absoulte has started to gain traction and spread across Faerûn, and coincidentally seems to be the source of the recent rise in tadpole infections.

