“So there’s really no limit to what we can cover.”
On the CW’s Charmed reboot, three sisters discover that they are witches who hold the power to fight evil forces lurking beneath the surface — literally, the underworld — of their hometown. But for oldest sister Macy Vaughn, played by British actor Madeleine Mantock, her newfound telekinetic ability is just one of the shocking revelations she must come to terms with.
Macy initially moves to the fictional Hilltown, Michigan, to work in the local university lab as a geneticist. That is, until she’s faced with the startling realization that her new town is also home to the two half-sisters and late mother she never knew she had. Coincidence? We think not. For the science and logic-driven Macy, the news is quite a lot to process.“Macy’s a character who is really great with her mind, but not so great with her emotions, and so it’s been really fun to get to play that,” Madeleine tells Teen Vogue. “It’s kind of a first for me.”
The twenty-eight-year-old actor previously starred on British shows Casualty and Lee Nelson’s Well Funny People, along with AMC’s Into the Badlands and the CW’s The Tomorrow People. But playing Macy, she says, is also the first time she’s gotten to portray a character who is not secondary to a lead male role. Instead, Charmed focuses on Macy’s relationship with her sisters Maggie and Mel, played by Sarah Jeffery and Melonie Diaz, respectively.
The series, which premieres October 14, is described by the network as being “fierce, feminist, and funny,” so it makes sense that sisterhood is a key element of its plotline. And while many of Hollywood’s depiction of witches still follow stereotypical tropes of old, evil, and ugly women on the hunt for youth and beauty (sorry, Hocus Pocus), Charmed attempts to reclaim the use of magic and show its powerful and positive impact through well-rounded, three-dimensional, complex characters. As the sisters attempt to uncover the supernatural circumstances surrounding their mother’s mysterious death, they also tackle social and personal issues such as sexual harassment, self-confidence, and grief — in Macy’s case, the loss of a parent she never got the chance to know.“I think the idea is for us to be as brave as we can, and we’re kind of blessed in the sense that we can have this duality of demons that you and I might face in this real world [that] can also present themselves as metaphysical demons that the characters as witches can try and vanquish,” Madeleine says. “So there’s really no limit to what we can cover.”
And with the show’s cast, Charmed also breaks pop culture’s tired tradition of only affording white women the opportunity to play witches. Although the show has been characterized as having Latinx main characters, Madeleine points out that women of color might be a more accurate term to describe her and her castmates: Madeleine is Afro-Caribbean and British, Melonie is Latinx, and Sarah is African-American, English, and Indigenous Canadian. With the announcement that there is also a Latinx witch in Charmed’s writing room, fans are excited that the series will finally pay homage to the fact that witchcraft is largely prevalent in communities of color.
“For me, it’s a necessity. It’s something that we should’ve had a long time ago,” says Madeleine. “But I’m happy it’s going to happen now, and I just hope that we can do more because I don’t think it stops with just having hired us three to be the three sisters.”
She does, however, point out that she doesn’t want this representation to be taken to the extreme of tokenism, which is why her, her castmates, and executive producer Jennie Snyder Urman (who also worked on Jane the Virgin) all spoke about how to make sure the series authentically reflects the sisters’ heritage. One solution, Madeleine explains, has been for Macy to have a different father than her sisters, and thus open up her character’s storyline to explore her background and the multitude of cultures that exist within witchcraft. Although she can’t give much away yet, she says she’s excited for the show to progress and respectfully honor Macy’s Afro-Latina identity as well as the practices and origins of witchcraft she’ll discover along the way.
“I think it’s important to do it because if you don’t, you end up just going, ‘Yeah, sure. She can play that. She looks passable enough,” Madeleine tells Teen Vogue. “I think we’re being conscious not to do that, and we’re being honest about the characters that we’re playing, how we got to be here, and how we’re trying to approach the story so that we can give a fair and honest representation of who these characters are.”As we get ready to watch the sisters embark on their adventures and learn to love and accept their own powers —both figuratively and literally — Madeleine hopes their journeys inspire us to look inside ourselves, too. After all, you don’t have to be a witch to believe in your own magic.
“I would love for people who watch our show to have a sense of confidence to really feel empowered that however they are is brilliant,” she says. “Just that idea that no one is you and that’s your power.”
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