In what might possibly be the most perfect bit of casting of 2018 so far, Lucy Davis will be playing Aunt Hilda in Netflix’s upcoming Sabrina The Teenage Witch TV series.
According to Deadline, Sabrina’s witch aunt Hilda Spellman is “more nurturing than Zelda,” and “Hilda’s motherly nature and warm sense of humour belie a wicked, ghoulish streak. She is as adept at brewing spite jars against her family’s enemies as she is at concocting love potions for the students at Baxter High.”
Davis is perhaps best known for breaking our hearts as Dawn in The Office and more recently making us laugh as Steve Trevor’s excellent secretary Etta Candy in last summer’s Wonder Woman.
Davis joins Mad Men‘s Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman, Doctor Who‘s Michelle Gomez as Mary Wardell, Sabrina’s favourite teacher and mentor at Baxter High, and newcomer Chance Perdomo as Sabrina’s warlock cousin Ambrose Spellman, who has been placed under house arrest by the Witches Council and is forbidden from leaving the Spellman’s funeral home.
The new series will revolve around Sabrina’s origins. In the comics, the witch was born to a warlock father and a mortal mother before she was promised to Satan as an infant and was set to be placed in a coven to grow up with a group of other witches.
However, her mother didn’t want that life for her daughter and attempted to run away with her. When the escape plan inevitably failed, Sabrina was sent to Greendale (a neighbouring town to Riverdale) to live with her aunts, Hilda and Zelda.
According to Deadline, the Sabrina series will be “tonally in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist,” and finds Sabrina “wrestling to reconcile her dual nature — half-witch, half-mortal — while standing against the evil forces that threaten her, her family and the daylight world humans inhabit.”
The untitled Sabrina series doesn’t yet have an air date. Get all the latest fantasy news with every issue of SciFiNow.