Hale Appleman Talks Taking on a New Role as the Monster in ‘The Magicians’ Season 4 [Video]

By the end of The Magicians Season 3, the majority of the show’s characters had no idea who they were. Given new personas as part of the Library’s (and apparently, Dean Fogg’s) nefarious plans for magic, each character was someone else entirely.

But none of the characters were in as dangerous a situation as Eliot, whose body was taken over by the Monster they’d accidentally unleashed in an earlier part of the Season 3 finale.

At San Diego Comic-Con, we spoke with Hale Appleman during a roundtable interview about what we can expect from the unnamed creature and what it’s been like to leave Eliot behind and take on a new role.

“There’s a bit of a childlike nature to the Monster, at least in the first few episodes (which is what we’ve shot),” Appleman said. “[Writer/executive producer] John McNamara said to me, ‘Can you play him as a 9-year-old without any empathy or impulse control?’ And I said, ‘Sure!’ And then they were like, ‘Wait, uh, what’s happening here?!'”

Appleman described the unnamed, menacing creature as “more powerful than any Big Bad we’ve seen on the show before.”

“He can destroy people with the flick of a finger or a breath. He can wreak major havoc in an urban center,” he said.

Appleman was initially apprehensive about playing someone so different from Eliot, but came to find the task very rewarding as an actor.

“At first, it was a little scary, because I’ve lived in Eliot’s shoes for three years. To change it up so drastically was a little bit of a challenge,” he said. “But it’s exciting! I really think that I’m changing the expectations of what the audience might expect to see from me. So that’s been fun for me.”

Appleman didn’t divulge any details about whether we can expect to see Eliot again or if he’s gone for good, but he said he’d like to see more of an exploration of Eliot’s past if he does return.

“Hopefully [Eliot] does [come back]. I haven’t seen him in the new scripts — we’ve shot through Episode 4. I don’t know when and if he’ll come back, but if he does — which I hope does happen — I’d like to see us explore some of his backstory and some of the internal emotional machinery of Eliot,” he said.

“I try to give you guys a glimpse of that through what I play in the scenes, but I think it would be great to more fully explore some of the dynamics that are alluded to — why he is the way he is, where he came from, what he wants, and where he’s going.”

Watch the full interview with Hale Appleman here:

Check out all of our coverage of San Diego Comic-Con here. There is a lot more to come!

The Magicians Season 4 will premiere in 2019 on Syfy.

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