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‘The Magicians’: Olivia Taylor Dudley explains that new Alice twist
It feels like we’ve seen dozens of different versions of Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) this year on “The Magicians,” from god-powered Alice to niffin Alice to alternate-reality Alice. Now we’re going to have to get to know human Alice all over again.
Thanks to some tricky spell work and one stolen shade, Alice is back in the land of the living and no longer a niffin. Unfortunately, it’s not something to celebrate just yet, since she’s not exactly happy about being human again.
“She’s super pissed,” Olivia Taylor Dudley says. “She’s not happy … I think when she became a niffin, she realized, ‘This is what real magic is, this is what I want to be. I want to go live in all these different universes and just be pure magic.’ So she got a taste of this wonderful thing, and now she’s back on earth as a human and stripped of all that magic. It’s really depressing and hard for her to forgive Quentin (Jason Ralph) for that.”
While fans might be surprised (and joyful) that she’s no longer dead — or dead for all intents and purposes — Dudley wasn’t shocked to hear that Alice would be back in the land of the living.
“I had read the books, and in the book series that Lev Grossman wrote, my character dies in the first book and then is gone for a whole book and brought back to life in the third book. So I really didn’t quite know the timeline of when it was going to happen, but I knew that Alice was going to die in a fight with the Beast, and I knew eventually she’d be brought back.”
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Nice to know that while we’ve all been wringing our hands over Alice’s fate and Quentin’s grief, she’s been sitting pretty with the knowledge that Alice wouldn’t be gone too long.
Speaking of Quentin’s grief, don’t expect things to go smoothly for him now that his girlfriend is no longer torturing him as a niffin. He and Alice still have a lot of issues to work through before they can be considered a happy couple again.
“Their relationship is so complex,” Dudley says. “They’ve been through a lot together. I always think they’re like magnets on the show. As much as they try to stay away from each other, they can’t. They’re always brought back together over and over again. That was my favorite thing in the books, the love between Alice and Quentin. It’s going to take a while for sure for them to be close again, but they can’t help themselves.”
As we head into the season finale, the fate of Fillory hangs in the balance, meaning the kings and queens will have bigger problems on their hands. When all is said and done, we can only hope Alice and Quentin will survive this latest disaster.
“The Magicians” airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Syfy.