Claudia Kim addresses the outrage over her casting of Nagini in Fantastic Beasts

The casting of Nagini threw up some red flags for fans and actress Claudia Kim voiced her shock over the Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald casting.

When the trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald showed Credence calling for Nagini, fans weren’t exactly too happy to see a woman take on the form of a snake. For one, we’ve always believed Voldemort’s pet to be just that…a snake.

So to see a Korean woman (when Nagini is of Indian descent) take on the form of this snake that we’ve come to know as one of Voldemort’s horcruxes was certainly jarring. The outrage wasn’t completely understood though. According to Mugglenet, Claudia Kim was surprised by the fan outrage over the casting of Nagini.

"It was unexpected. When I found out that I’m playing Nagini, I thought it was meaningful because it’s an important character in the ‘Harry Potter’ series. ‘Harry Potter’ is a franchise film with many caucasian actors, so I thought many Korean viewers would be happy."

The thing is, the problem didn’t come from Nagini being a woman of color. The problem came from a whole bunch of other issues. One, Nagini comes from Sanskrit and many perceived her, if she were to be a woman, to be one of Indian descent. That is if we saw Nagini as a woman in the first place.

The beloved pet of Voldemort is one that does his bidding without question, is his servant because, well, we thought it was a pet. Now that we know that Nagini was in fact a woman, it changes a lot of the way we view that relationship.

What does it say about her as a woman that she’d willingly submit herself to Voldemort? That being said, we don’t know the real connection of her character yet. We’ll have to wait and see what the movie has in store for us.

Check back here on Wizards and Whatnot for more news as we get closer to the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.