Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘The Magicians’ offers a grown-up look at spellbinding friends
Jason Ralph, Stella Maeve and Olivia Taylor Dudley are sitting on a sofa together in a Pasadena hotel demonstrating finger-tutting.
It’s a type of dance that involves intricate movements of the fingers.
The three stars of Syfy’s “The Magicians” use finger-tutting for a different purpose — it’s for when their characters are about to cast spells.
“We have people who choreograph the moves for us. They have long fingers with flexible joints and what they can do is incredible,” says Ralph, who plays Quentin Coldwater, a young man who only discovered his magical abilities in college. “They do a really good job of scaling it down for us.”
Dudley, whose character, Alice, inherited her abilities at a young age, jokes that she has gotten good at moving really fast when finger-tutting “because I’m not good at bending my fingers.”
The show, which has been called Harry Potter for adults, has been adapted from Lev Grossman’s New York Times best-selling trilogy “The Magicians.” The story also has a bit of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series to it, too.
When the second season opens, Quentin and Alice are in the enchanted world of Fillory on a quest to save magic. Quentin had grown up believing that Fillory was just a place in a series of books he read as a kid. While contemplating grad school, he and his friend, Maeve’s character Julia, are recruited for Brakebills, an academy for an education in magic.
Julia, however, fails the test to get in, but soon pursues her obsession through darker, tawdrier means. As Season 2 unfolds, we find her in New York City in the company of The Beast, an evil force. He is played by Charles Mesure, and the character loves to sing show tunes.
“Show tunes,” Maeve shudders, acting like her character in the series. “Actually, I feel bad not being able to say something nice and having to make fun of him,” says the actress about Mesure, who has a good voice.
“It’s one of the interesting elements of the show. Nothing is allowed to be black-and-white or good or bad,” says Ralph, who runs a theater company in New York City when not shooting the series.
“Even our villain, The Beast, is who he is because of his background. He’s not just a sociopath trying to steal magic. He’s a scarred person trying to survive in the only place he feels safe.”
Since the main characters in “The Magicians” are all a good decade older than the “Harry Potter” crew, they have different problems and more-adult urges.
“A lot of the characters walk the line of who is evil and who is good,” says Dudley.
Their characters are like anyone in their 20s, faced with difficult choices about who they are, observes Ralph. So there is plenty of angst, and the series doesn’t shy away from sex in a discreet enough, basic-cable way.
“Many of the characters are one spell away from becoming a villain, and that could paint their entire life,” says Dudley.
“The Magicians” is shot in Vancouver. “It’s a cool group of people because it isn’t just actors. There’s a lot of storytellers,” says Ralph.
The series isn’t all seriousness, though. It manages to drop humor into the hocus pocus, such as with a goofy reference to “Dirty Dancing” in the first episode this season.
“The show is a fun, immersive experience about what it means to be human,” observes Dudley, “because it moves so fast that one episode seems to go through a lifetime of decisions.”
“All of the characters are trying to get back to themselves,” adds Maeve, who will be in the upcoming Netflix movie “Take the 10,” with Andy Samberg. “Some of us have gotten very far away.”