Madeleine heeft een interview gehad met Paper Magazine over ‘Charmed’, hiervoor is een outtakes gebruikt van een footoshoot met Rachell Smith waarvan eerder al een outtakes van verscheen in Teen Vogue.

Galerij Links:
http//: 2018:Rachell Smith (Teen Vouge)

Feminism is mainstream, everyone’s obsessed with witches, and people are dying to see bad guys get what they deserve — the way they don’t in real life.

There’s no more appropriate show to be rebooted in 2018 than Charmed: a relic of girl power TV’s golden age, that follows good-and-evil moral logic, and in which, with a flourish of halter tops, chokers and velvet, three badass women, who love each other more than any men in their life, dispatch weekly demons via the power of sisterhood.

While the original fully transports you into the 90’s, bad and good, the Charmed reboot, created by by none other than Jane The Virgin show-runner and Gilmore Girls writer Jennie Snyder Urman, as well her collaborators Jessica O’Toole and Amy Rardin, smacks you over the head with 2018.

Its feminism is more inclusive and barbed. The Charmed Ones, instead of Prue, Piper and Phoebe, are now three women of color: Macy, the telekinetic hyper-rational scientist oldest half-sister who was raised apart from the others, Mel, the time-freezing queer college activist; and Maggie, the mind-reading freshman sorority girl — played by Madeleine Mantock, Melonie Diaz and Sarah Jeffery, respectively.

Some of the nods to contemporary politics are blunt — the very first demon they battle is a white male professor accused of sexual assault who preys on young women’s life forces, and shortly after the girls are introduced to the Book of Shadows, they discover a prophecy that names Trump’s presidency as the first sign of the apocalypse. But the larger metaphors for women coming into or discovering their power, and the nature of the monsters in our communities, are subtle and effective.

It’s particularly exciting to see a show that both suffered from the blinding whiteness and heteronormativity of girl power culture, and contributed to the whitewashing of sci-fi and witchcraft, make its stories more inclusive. It also started a conversation about race and casting after many jumped to the conclusion that all three actresses were Latinx, despite that of the three, only Diaz is Latinx, while Mantock identifies as Afro-Caribbean and Jeffery identifies as African-American.

Mantock wants to clear up this confusion, and stress that Charmed, armed with a diverse writing room (which even includes a witch) is working carefully and thinking critically in order to ensure its representation more than surface-level.

The British actress, who has gained attention for her role on Into The Badlands, wasn’t sold on the idea of the reboot for nostalgia’s sake, but after reading it’s sharp, conscious script, fell in love.

Although she’s relishing a lead role on a politically-engaged, female-driven show, Mantock is critical of limited and self-congratulatory diversity — and wants to see representation go even further:

“I want us to have a love interest or a beautifully, wonderful desired woman be the darkest person you’ve ever seen. I want there to be plus-sized women… I want us to explore what it’s like to have a disability or what it’s like to be trans in this world. I want it to be all-encompassing, and not just a palatable version of multi-ethnic witch-ness.”

The keys? She says “specificity in representation” and a nuanced conversation.

Mantock spoke with PAPER about tackling a beloved legacy reboot, Charmed’s political layers, and her open-mind about witchcraft.

Tell me why you wanted to be a part of Charmed.
We managed to get the pilot script, which they weren’t giving out very freely. I said, ‘No, I really want to get to read it so I know what I’m getting into. I was so pleasantly surprised at how funny and smart and conscious it was — I haven’t seen that in a really long time. I thought it was a wonderful way to broach important subjects, be they women’s issues or political issues, in a way that’s also tied into this wonderful magical fantasy that everybody loves.

I loved watching Matilda and I loved watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch when I was growing up. I think everybody can tap into that fantasy of “what if you did have powers?” I’ve done quite a few shows that were sci-fi related and I did a martial arts show, but I’ve never been able to be in on the action. I’ve always been the character that’s either kind of the human element or a mother earth figure looking after everybody. So this is the first time where I’m like, ‘I might get to be a witch!’

The show feels as 2018 as the old Charmed felt ’90’s-early 2000’s. So although they’re so different, it has the same intensity of capturing a moment in culture.

We wanted it to be a kind of but a mirror to what society is at this point in time so that we can entertain, but also alleviate some worries and concerns and pressures that people deal with day to day. We want it to be a mirror of the 2018 life experience.

Read More