


“In our show, boys can be fairies, girls can be specialists,” says Young. That meant challenging the outdated gender roles of the original animated series. The Irish landscape gives Fate its connection to ancient faerie magic, but the show also had to feel relevant to the concerns of modern teens. “We were filming around, like, castles!” says Cowen. “It was cool it was like college.”įor the show’s many exterior scenes – outdoor learning is key to the Alfea curriculum – locations were found around County Wicklow in Ireland, which is a good fit for most people’s internalised image of a magical fairy kingdom. “Usually, at weekends, we’d go to one of our apartments and hang out, drink wine, talk, just bond,” says Cowen. The younger cast members had the intense boarding school experience replicated for them – they were housed in the same building for the duration of the six-month shoot. I think embracing difference is important.” “It’s people with different stories, interests and experiences. “It’s not just the ‘cool girl’ hanging out with the ‘cool girls’,” she says. For Cowen, who was bullied in middle school and home schooled for several years as a result, this is a particularly compelling theme. But magical boarding schools make a potent premise for a reason, says Young: “It’s a fantasy that I think a lot of people have when they’re that age, because you’re just trying to find somewhere where you don’t feel so alone and so different.”Ĭontrary to the usual clique-based hierarchies of high school drama, however, Fate depicts friendships forming between teenagers who come from different worlds – literally. The script gets this out of the way early with a scene in which Aisha accuses a wide-eyed Bloom of being “the one person in the universe who’s never read any Harry Potter”. The austere buildings and eccentric teaching staff – Downton Abbey’s Robert James-Collier is a dashing fencing instructor, while The Inbetweeners’ Alex Macqueen pops up as a botany master – sets up Fate for an inevitable comparison. Photograph: NetflixĪlfea will feel familiar – and not just to the 14- to 25-year-olds who grew up watching Winx Club on Nickelodeon.
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Like, that’s what you’re learning at school!” Growing up amid the orange groves of a Florida farm also inspired her professional interest in fantasy worlds, she says: “Nothing’s really a coincidence when it comes to roles that work out, I think, because clearly you’re connected to it for a reason … I was just always playing outside and creating magical scenarios.”īrian Young previously worked on the supernatural teen drama The Vampire Diaries.
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According to Cowen, the Sunshine State could be considered an otherworldly realm: “I mean, we’re taught at a young age how to combat alligators. She and Young soon bonded over their shared “Florida weirdo” identity – Young’s term. I walked out convinced I’d never be invited back.” As it turns out, that adorably awkward entrance was exactly right for fish-out-of-water Bloom, who trips over a few suitcases of her own in the pilot. “I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, they think I’m some crazy person!’ I just sat in the waiting room with my giant suitcase and everyone was staring. The camera loves her.”Ĭowen did not feel so confident when she stumbled into the audition room, en route to the airport. It is the novice, though, who is our way into Fate’s universe – and Young believes he has found a star in 22-year-old Cowen: “She’s stunningly beautiful, but perfectly relatable. There is the tenacious water fairy Aisha (Precious Mustapha) the grounded and chatty earth fairy Terra (Eliot Salt) the mind fairy Musa (Elisha Applebaum), an empath who keeps her headphones on to block out other people’s emotions and Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen), a snooty light fairy who also happens to be fairy royalty.
