Following the news that The Office and Wonder Woman‘s Lucy Davis has been cast as Aunt Hilda in Netflix’s Sabrina The Teenage Witch reboot earlier this week, we were expecting an Aunt Zelda casting announcement to follow. That announcement is here.
Miranda Otto (who played Eowyn in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers and Return Of The King, as well as Mary Ann in War Of The Worlds) is taking on the role. Variety describes Zelda as “proud and devout,” and she “believes there is no greater honour than serving the Dark Lord as a member of the Church of Night. She is the family’s disciplinarian, fiercely protective of Sabrina, and very much Cain to aunt Hilda’s Abel.”
Otto also 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 Babyand 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.