The Sabrina The Teenage Witch series casting news is still coming thick and fast: Richard Coyle (The Collection, Going Postal) is the latest actor to join Netflix’s upcoming rebooted show.
He will be playing Father Blackwood, the High Priest of the Church of Night and Dean of the Academy of the Unseen Arts. Deadline describes the character as “ruthless and ambitious, Blackwood hides a terrifying dark agenda that will put him in direct conflict with Sabrina and other members of the coven.”
Coyle 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, Lucy Davis (Wonder Woman) and Miranda Otto (The Lord Of The Rings trilogy) as Aunt Hilda and Aunt Zelda respectively, 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.