What can you tease about your characters in season 2?
Jason Ralph: It’s nice because Quentin and the audience are starting off in kind of the same headspace at the beginning of the season, where he literally has no idea what’s happening because he’s laying on the floor, covered in blood. The blood of, like, all of his friends and he’s not sure if any of them are alive or dead. The beginning is just like us him on a journey to save their lives.
Alice is in a pretty bad position after the season one finale…
Olivia Taylor Dudley: Yeah, Alice is on the floor bleeding out at the end of season one. Like Jason said, we pick up where we left off. But Alice gets up and she gets off the floor, amazed she’s alive, and she’s still powered by Ember, so she has all these magical powers, and instantly it’s like a call to action and she goes and tries to help everybody. Everybody comes back… maybe.
Is there hope for Alice and Quentin? They had a pretty nasty breakup…
Jason Ralph: I don’t know. Their relationship will go through different phases a lot in the beginning of the season. The stakes are so high. We’re in, like, life or death situations, so we don’t have the luxury to deal with some of the more complicated issues that would help resolve their relationship or bring us to a better place.
Olivia Taylor Dudley: I mean, these two are inseparable. They’re like magnets. No matter what, they’re always going to find each other, I think, in life and in some sort of capacity. I think this season we get to explore different versions of the relationship and see it in different ways. But the bottom line, there are so much bad things happening that they don’t always get to talk about what happened between them… This season they’re kind of bound together a lot and they have to spend a lot of time together.
Are we going to see a lot more of Fillory this year?
Jason Ralph: Last season, we got a lot of sneak peeks of a couple different worlds. This season we kind of step back and we get to see so much more of them. What I think is really fun and one of the themes of the season is we get to see how these worlds start influencing each other and how they depend on each other.
Olivia Taylor Dudley: Magic is such a bigger character this season. Just like Fillory. It’s just a bigger scale this season. When people ask me what season two is about, it’s just a lot larger, a lot bigger. I think people who are fans of the fantasy genre, like myself, they’re going to be really pleased this season to see a lot more magic.
How is Quentin going to be handling Julia teaming up the Beast?
Jason Ralph: It’s complicated. So much of this world that was expected to be black and white is actually quite gray. The relationships are getting increasingly complicated, and so Quentin has a unique insight as to why Julia was forced to make the decisions that she was and what she truly needs or what she feels she needs, I think it’s more difficult than to just be mad. Quentin is sort of in the middle of these two warring factions. We have Team Brakebills and Team Julia… We’re all after the same goal, but they’re going about it completely different ways. And so part of the struggle for him is how can I get these two parties to understand each other and to communicate. If we could just do that, things would be much simpler.
The Magicians returns Jan. 25 at 9 p.m. ET on SyFy.
HollywoodLifers, are you looking forward to season two of The Magicians? Let us know!