There are films you can’t remember watching for the first time, only the feeling of having always known them. For much of my generation, Practical Magic is one of them — and the same is true for Maisie Williams. “I don’t remember the first time [I watched Practical Magic],” she admits. “I would have been quite young.” What she remembers instead is one particular re-watch: a sofa, her mother beside her, and the strange serendipity of watching the 1998 cult classic again while auditioning to join its 2026 sequel, Practical Magic 2. “It was so much fun,” she says. “We laughed and cried.”

In Practical Magic 2, Williams plays Antonia Owens — one of Sally Owens’ (Sandra Bullock) two daughters, sister to Kylie (Joey King), now a medical student. A generation ago, Sally and her sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman) were the beating heart of the original; the sequel hands that dynamic down to Sally’s girls. Kylie is the fiery one: reactive, impulsive, the sibling who cracks open the family’s darkest secrets and sets the whole story in motion. Antonia is her opposite number. Her power is measured, sharper, the kind that doesn’t announce itself.

When Williams first read the script, it wasn’t spectacle that drew her to her character. It was restraint. “I liked her quiet power,” Williams says of Antonia. “The journey of incorporating magic into her life, which is dominated by medicine, felt like a story I could enjoy telling.” Here is a woman of science asked to make room for the inexplicable — a premise that could easily tip into the absurd, which is exactly why Williams saw it as a chance to ground the character in something real.

The obvious version of Antonia would have been the stiff, buttoned-up foil to a freer sibling. Williams wanted none of it. “It would have been too easy to play Antonia as uptight and therefore smaller than her sister,” she explains. “I liked the playful nature Joey and I found under the covers in the bedroom scene. I liked Antonia teasing her sister about falling in love rather than being more traditionally supportive. Sisters are more cutting than that.”

That instinct — to resist the easy read — carried into how she held her own opposite Bullock and Kidman, a multi-generational masterclass that could have felt paralysing. Williams treated it as an invitation to experiment instead. “I pushed myself to keep it fresh and try new things,” she says. “Rather than being married to getting one perfect take, I wanted to get as many options as possible. Sandra and Nicole were incredible at that.”

So how do you honour the fantasy without losing the human? For Williams, the balance wasn’t something she had to engineer so much as something the material already understood. “[The Practical Magic universe] manages to explore dark themes with light comedy,” she says. “Life itself never has one theme or genre; everything happens all at once, whether you like it or not. I love the way Practical Magic twists and bends genre.”

Ask her to imagine the Owens women in less witchy circumstances — say, dropped into a Fortnite Battle Royale — and Williams, an actual player of the game, doesn’t hesitate. “I think Aunt Gilly would get eliminated first because she’d be foraging for spell ingredients and get lost wandering into the storm. And I think Kylie would have to avenge her; only she has the fire to go the whole way.”