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.

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“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.”

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