Last weekend, after watching the pilot of CW’s Charmed reboot, The Workprint got a chance to sit down with the new charmed ones, Melonie Diaz (Mel), Sarah Jeffery (Maggie) and Madeline Mantock (Macy) to discuss what fans can expect this season on Charmed.
What attracted you to the reboot?
Madeleine Mantock: For the first time they were attracted to me! When I read the script I just thought it was really fun. It made me smile a lot more than I was anticipating because I was a little bit skeptical. I didn’t know why this reboot was such a big deal and what made it different. But I was really pleasantly surprised. I just kept saying it’s very current and conscious in a way that I had not been expecting nor had I read in a long time. It feels like, every now and again I go on Tumblr, and it feels like if people on Tumblr got to write a show it would be this.
How are you putting yourself into the role and do you take into account the original series and its fandom?
Mantock: Macy’s a new character and in that sense, it’s kind of freeing because, I think much like if I suppose you were playing a real person, there’s extra pressure that comes with playing an existing character. Because we have a chance to create a new character I don’t feel so much pressure in that sense which I’m really grateful for because I think it would be a totally different story if we were just repeating what’s already been made. And whilst we are borrowing from and paying homage to certain elements of the show be that hopefully a sense of sisterhood and The Book of Shadows and having a Whitelighter you know those kinds of key elements. We really are trying to kind of build a new offshoot.
Sarah Jeffery: We definitely want to keep the original intact and pay respects to them and there’s a lot from the original that remains if not the same then similar. Obviously, we’re playing different characters but we’re also in a very different time and I think it’s the perfect time to do a show like this. It’s kind of a cathartic thing to be speaking on such troubling issues and so I think our show will reflect that magic and the sisterhood of the original while bringing in the reality of the political climate that we’re living in.
In the panel you were talking about how you wanted to mix the makeup loving girl with the intelligent girl. Maggie is in college and in the pilot we really only saw the Greek Life part, will we also see the academic part this season?
Jeffery: Yes, you will. We are kind of getting more into that now. I can’t give away too much. I think the thing about Maggie is that she’s sort of finding her tribe like maybe Greek Life isn’t completely for her. We’re still sort of exploring that. But she’s still young and she’s still navigating and figuring things out and I’m really having fun with that. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do. I certainly didn’t for a while and found myself here. I think that Maggie will be a very relatable character and like I said we want to make her very multifaceted.
Is Macy going to struggle with how she fits into Vera family dynamics?
Mantock: It’s a definite struggle both in terms of the initial dynamic of trying to be a friend and a sister to these new people and then also within herself, figuring out that she’s a witch, does she fit in in this family, and she kinda feels anyway that she doesn’t have that much of a choice and moves into the house at the end of the pilot. Now she’s in, she’s a sister. But there are definitely some real fun moments actually, some of my favorites to play, especially between mine and Melonie’s character because she’s much less welcoming than Maggie is and I think maybe that we have more similarities than the characters realize so they butt heads a little bit. But those are some of my favorite scenes cause they’re the kind of human sisterly bond that hopefully, people will care about aside from all the fantastical magical wish fulfillment that’s also great but I really treasure those moments.
Diaz: You’ll see that Mel and Macy have a really interesting relationship cause they’re both very similar so they butt heads a lot which is hard for me because I really like Maddie, a lot and we laugh at all those takes and I’m like ‘I have to be angry with you but I don’t want to be angry with you.’ But yeah, kinda like the family dynamic is interesting in the first couple of episodes.
Jeffery: Mel and Maggie have always been close, unlike Macy. I think the thing I enjoy a lot about the show is that its a very real sister dynamic. You’ll see them butt heads but you’ll also see that they love each other unconditionally. And I think that the mother’s death is something that kind of tears them apart but brings them together at the same time. Maggie is a person who I think if she thinks about it or obsesses about it too much she’ll just crumble and Mel is very insistent on finding out what happened. So you kind of see their different ideas colliding and I’m hoping we hit a home run on the family dynamic of it all.
On the point of feeling too much, Maggie probably has the most intrusive power out of all of them. Are we going to see her deal with how to handle knowing someone else’s thoughts that you don’t want to know?
Jeffery: Yes, I would say intrusive is the perfect word. That’s definitely been a throughline for my character and I hope we can do more with it. I mean it’s very interesting in terms of being able to control what you hear and when you want to hear something, when you don’t want to hear something, and what you do with that information because it definitely has shown up, as you will see in the following episodes, at very inopportune times which can be quite humorous but also quite devastating for her. I’ve sort of been like “what would it be like to actually read minds?” and it seems like it would be kinda shit. But on the opposite hand, it does have pros as well.
In the first 5 minutes of the pilot, we get to see Mel in bed with another woman, which is very rare for a main character on a network show. How does it feel coming into the reboot playing this main character that is hopefully gonna be a gay icon?
Diaz: Oh my god. From your mouth to God’s ears. I would love to be a gay icon. It feels really cool and it also feels really cool that the creators and I, we’re making a very conscious decision never to talk about her being a lesbian. It’s not an issue, she’s a woman who loves another woman, and she’s a human being and she’s a witch. We’re not making an issue of it, it just should be normal. SO I really feel great that they are like ‘ You know, she’s a human being.’ and that’s it
You can find the full interviews with all three actors below:
