Game of Thrones star says she tried witchcraft to land film role

Maisie Williams has claimed that before playing a witch in Practical Magic 2 she once tried paying a witch to help her land a film.

“I paid an Etsy witch to give me a role, to help me manifest a role in a movie,” the Game of Thrones star told British Vogue, at the European premiere of Practical Magic 2 in London. “She told me some things that I had to say every night.”

Though she dutifully repeated the prescribed words, Williams said, “it didn't happen”.

Practical Magic 2 picks up nearly three decades after the 1998 original, with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman returning as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, whose family is still living under the shadow of an ancient curse.

Williams plays Antonia Owens, the grown-up daughter of Sally and the younger sister of Joey King’s Kylie, and is training to become a neurosurgeon.

The sequel, directed by Susanne Bier and based on Alice Hoffman’s 2021 novel The Book of Magic, follows the Owens women as they confront the return of the family curse after Kylie’s boyfriend is involved in a potentially fatal accident and she sets out to break the curse herself.

Though the Etsy witch didn’t work out, Williams said she still avoided walking across three consecutive drain covers, an old British superstition traditionally associated with bad luck.

“I just have to. I stick with that one,” she said. “It makes me feel like everything is going to be fine. It makes me feel like I have control over the uncontrollable, which I don’t.”

Speaking at the European premiere last week, Kidman told The Independent that Practical Magic 2, released 28 years after the first film, existed because of fans.

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“It’s about sisterhood, it's about family,” she said. “When it first came out, it reached a smaller section of people than we'd hoped for, and then suddenly it found its way.”

Bullock described how “special” and “easy” it was to return to her character of Sally. “It found its people and its tribe through social media, all the themes got to live over and over and over again,” she said. “And when you see something that beloved, you don't wanna mess with it. But then Alice Hoffman wrote the book.”

Evan Rachel Wood, who played Kylie in the original film, told Entertainment Tonight in July she “hadn’t had the chance to connect” with King about playing the character.

“You know, I read the book and it seems like they’re not following the book,” she said.

“I think in the book it would have made sense to bring me back. I think in the way that they’re redoing it, and approaching it, it didn’t make sense.”

Practical Magic 2 is releasing in theatres on 11 September 2026.