Just days after Lucy Davis was cast in the series, Variety reports Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings) is the latest actress to join Netflix’s Sabrina The Teenage Witch reboot. She will play Sabrina’s Aunt Zelda, rounding out the members of the young witch’s family.
While Hilda (Lucy Davis) is Sabrina’s fun-loving aunt, Zelda is the sterner aunt. Proud and devout, Zelda believes there is no greater honor than serving the Dark Lord as a member of the Church of Night. She is the family’s disciplinarian, fiercely protective of Sabrina, and very much Cain to aunt Hilda’s Abel.
She joins Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men), who is playing Sabrina, and Jaz Sinclair (Slender Man) as her best friend Rosalind Walker. Other cast members are newcomer Chance Perdomo as Sabrina’s English cousin and warlock Ambrose Spellman and Michelle Gomez (Doctor Who) as Mary Wardell, Sabrina’s favourite teacher
Based on the hit comic book series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the description for the new series reads: “An empowered young woman, half-human, half-witch, Sabrina is just beginning her dark education as a sorceress, even as she tries to maintain a normal life as a sophomore at Baxter High. Intelligent, compassionate and brave to the point of recklessness, Sabrina is all that stands between us and the forces of darkness that threaten our world.”
The Untitled Sabrina Project imagines the origin and adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a dark coming-of-age story that traffics in horror, the occult and, of course, witchcraft. Tonally in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, this adaptation 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.
