You don’t have to believe in magic to star in Syfy’s The Magicians, but it’s worked out pretty well for Stella Maeve (top).
Maeve plays outsider magician Julia Wicker in the series, which airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET and is swirling toward the end of its second season on April 19.
She says she grew up liking magic – not the kind where you saw people in half or pull a quarter out from behind your nephew’s ear, but the deeper kind that lies at the root of the book series from which The Magicians was adapted.
“I liked magic in the ethereal sense,” says Maeve. “The unexplained stuff in life. The idea that there’s something going on that’s bigger than us.
“It’s nice to believe there are things we can’t see. As Julia, it’s fun to play with that.”
Maeve acknowledges, of course, that “fun” isn’t always the watchword for Julia.
For most of her life, Julia led a fairly normal life. She was a bright student who got accepted into an Ivy League college.
She was also the best friend of Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph, top). Both were interested in magic, so both applied to Brakebills University, which offers advanced magic training.
Quentin was accepted. Julia was not. Only later did she discover the reason, and in the meantime, she pursued magic on her own, a course that led her into deeply treacherous waters.
Summarizing the storyline of the first two seasons would be like explaining Middle Eastern politics in a tweet. Suffice it to say, Julia has found herself drawn into rather serious situations involving people with a wide range of magical powers and a wide range of attitudes about good and evil.
Some of those people want to save the world, and some want to destroy it, which can involve destroying people along the way. At one point, Julia found herself forced into a situation where it looked as if she might have to kill Quentin to save him.
After playing out that kind of intense drama, you might think Maeve would be looking for a breather elsewhere in her acting life.
Not necessarily.
“When we were on break last year, I did my first comedy,” she says. “It was a fun change of pace. Comedy is fun, and I get it.
“But I like the darkness. Comedy is so far from reality, and I think it’s nice to be more grounded. Dark material is more relatable.”
In a way, the broader premise of The Magicians reflects what Maeve suggests is a dark and frustrating truth of real life.
To many people, magic sounds like one of life’s potentially easiest answers. Wave a wand, something goes poof, and suddenly a troublesome person or problem is gone, or suddenly a million dollars appears on the dining room table.
The Magicians strongly suggests that’s not how magic shakes out.
“It’s a metaphor for life,” says Maeve. “It’s about people thinking, ‘Oh, once I have this, I can be happy,’ when the reality is, you can’t. We think external things bring happiness and they don’t.”
We’re also, Maeve suggests, living in a time when reality can be hard to deal with.
“That’s why the superhero genre is so popular now,” she says. “Because people want an escape. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, America, what’s happening?’ They don’t want to talk about what’s really going on.”
To the extent Julia, Quentin, and others with magical powers have found a potential avenue for escape, that doesn’t make their new lives any easier.
In fact, Maeve muses, it would be easier for Julia if her life quest were only something like a new car or a great cheap apartment.
Her sights are somewhat higher.
“She wants to become a goddess,” says Maeve. “She wants to become a force of nature. She wants to talk to animals.”
Goals with which Maeve is completely on board.
“Who wouldn’t love that?” she says. “Who wouldn’t want to do that? To know what dogs are thinking, or the birds are saying?”
Julia pays a price for taking the path that could lead her there, but Maeve says that even when Julia had second thoughts, her course was set.
“At one point in the first season she decided she wanted to go back to her normal life,” Maeve notes. “She couldn’t. She had seen too much to return.”
While that may sound like high melodrama, the 27-year-old Maeve says it’s actually something else that’s surprisingly true to real life.
“Oh God,” she says. “I really wish I didn’t know some of the things I know. That happens a lot.”
What also happens in life, she suggests, is that close friends like Julia and Quentin can go through rough passages and maintain the friendship.
“I’d like to think Julia and Quentin have a toughness,” she says. “The one thing you see with all these changes is that they remain part of each other’s lives. I think they always will.”
Their lives, of course, will not resemble the lives of their high school classmates who went to college and majored in economics.
Maeve is fine with Julia taking a different path.
“Being normal is terrible,” she says. “Who wants to be normal?
“In the books, Julia eventually becomes a goddess, and I really hope the series ends that way, too. That’s why I’m still here. I want that to happen.”