SDCC 2017: The Magicians

The Magicians is one of our favorites so it’s always a joy to chat about what happened last season and what might be coming next.

Real talk about what to expect next season:

Sera Gamble (writer & producer): Stuff goes very very poorly for our characters. They have to get jobs.
John McNamara (writer & producer): They all have to get cell phones again! [laughter]
Sera Gamble: Season 1 was finding your people and trying to figure out who you were. Season 2, they have to take responsibility. In the [writer’s] room, we talk a lot about that moment when you’re growing up–it might be when you’re 16 or it might be when you’re 25–when your parents stop helping, and you are now out on your own. There’s an ebb and flow in real life to abundance and resources. Our characters have been in this environment of abundance for a few seasons. Now we’ve taken that away, and it says a lot about them when we see how the act when they don’t have that.

Jason Ralph (Quentin): We’ll see what further repercussions come out of [losing magic].
Stella Maeve (Julia): I think we’re in for a crazy season with a lot of turmoil. At the start of this season, [Q and Julia are] together. We’re shooting the first two episodes now, and we’re filming together. It’s exciting for them to be together because normally we’re separate.
Jason Ralph: We actually have common interests this season. Normally, we’ve been as odds with one another. We’ve both wanted different things, but we’re both pursuing the same goals. It’s really nice. I like working with Stella as an actor and we got to establish the series together in the pilot.

Olivia Taylor Dudley (Alice): She hasn’t come to terms with [Q bringing her back] by any means. She’s very angry at Quentin for what he did. He basically told her what her life should be. She sacrificed herself knowing what she would become [a niffin] and when she got there she realized it was the best thing ever. It was the relationship with magic that she was looking for her whole life. She’s very angry to be back in her human body and to be forgetting what magic was like in “niffin-land”. I think there’s a lot of secrets in her head. We haven’t gotten to explore it yet that I hope happens this season….She’s [also] always had a complicated relationship with this girl she doesn’t really know, Julia. A lot of jealousy. i think she will always feel that way toward her, but [Julia] also has that thing that Alice wants right now–that spark of magic.

Jason Ralph: I feel like in the second season Quentin learned a lot about who he is and what he wants. It shed a lot of weird adolescence stuff in his pursual of [Alice] and for her. There’s the idea of the journey and moving forward and forward momentum; there’s fear in sitting still. A lot of this season is him forging forward because it’s terrifying to look backwards.

Hale Appleman (Eliot): We’ve read the first couple of episodes which is what we’re shooting right now. We’re dealing with the invasion of the fairies right now at the castle. So, we’re being ruled and trying to rule our kingdom. There’s this hierarchical ladder happening. We were talking the other day of having to establish that as a power dynamic since it wasn’t really explored in season 2.
Summer Bishil (Margo): We’re under fairy occupation…I think it’s going to be a really exciting elemtent to the show.

H: This season Eliot commissions The Muntjac which is the big boat in the second book. [It’s] the questing boat that brings the heroes to different parts of Fillory that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. It’s also Eliot’s quest to find his own identity outside of magic, which is a huge question for him.

And, now, let’s talk about last season. What was your favorite thing about it? 

Jason Ralph: [When Q re-enters the real world] was one of my favorite episodes to shoot. I loved the choice that Quentin makes to give magic up. And just to put him in completely different context, out of this world that we’ve established so thoroughly and to have the opportunity to have a quiet “simple” little love story. It felt like a real pleasure.

Olivia Taylor Dudley: The last couple episodes of season 2 were my favorite to shoot. I love working with Jason. Those scenes at Breakbills South when [Quentin] brings [Alice] back were really beautiful, and they gave us a lot of space to personalize and make it feel real. That’s what so great about this show. They don’t tell us how to feel, and they let the actors make really complicated decisions in their head about where the characters are going. They give us bullet points, but let us decide, “This is how alice is feeling about quentin right now.”

We can’t wait to see what’s in store for everyone when season 3 begins. Stay tuned for more updates!

Cast photo and panel photo by: Matt Winkelmeyer/SYFY