Evan Rachel Wood believes she was left out of “Practical Magic 2” because the filmmakers chose to diverge from Alice Hoffman’s source material rather than adapt it faithfully. Speaking with Entertainment Tonight, the actress, who played Sally Owens’ elder daughter in the 1998 original, said she had read Hoffman’s follow-up novel, “The Book of Magic,” and concluded the finished script strays from it. “I think in the book it would have made sense to bring me back,” she said, adding that the new approach made her absence “make sense” from the studio’s perspective, even if it stung personally.
Wood first addressed the snub earlier this month on Instagram, writing that she had volunteered for even a single scene or line but was told producers were recasting the role. “It was not in my control or my choice,” she wrote at the time. “I would have happily rejoined my sisters.” Joey King has since stepped into the part, while Maisie Williams plays the younger sister previously portrayed by Alexandra Artrip.
Wood told Entertainment Tonight the exclusion carries extra weight because of the bond formed on the original set as children. “We bonded with that cast so much as children,” she said, and losing the chance to revisit the Owens family estate as an adult, alongside those same castmates, represented history that “can’t be faked.”
Director Susanne Bier’s sequel reunites Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, with Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing also returning as their aunts. The story, loosely drawn from Hoffman’s 2021 book, follows the family’s next generation as they attempt to break the generations-old curse that dooms any man who falls for an Owens woman. Lee Pace, Xolo Maridueña and Solly McLeod round out the new cast. Bullock and Kidman, who also produce, have said crews rebuilt the original film’s cliffside house for the shoot.
“Practical Magic 2” opens in theaters Sept. 11, moved up a week from its original date.
