Evan Rachel Wood Wasn’t Recast — She Was Silently Written Out of Practical Magic 2

They Made a Sequel to the Movie That Made Her Name — and Never Called

Evan Rachel Wood was 12 years old when Practical Magic hit theaters in 1998. She played Kylie Owens — the adopted daughter of Sally (Sandra Bullock), the bright spark in a household haunted by a generations-old curse. Nearly three decades later, when Warner Bros. set out to turn Alice Hoffman’s sequel novel into a second film, the production had a simple job: return to the house, the sisters, the magic. According to Wood, one thing never happened. Nobody called.

“I offered my services,” Wood said in an Instagram post last year, “even if it was one scene or one line. I was told they are re-casting. I am sorry to disappoint the fans. It was not in my control or my choice. I would have happily rejoined my sisters.”

This summer, the story got louder. In an Instagram story reported by Variety, Wood revealed that not a single person from the original film — and not a single person on the new one — had reached out before recasting her role. “No One Who Worked on the Original Film Reached Out to Her,” Variety’s headline read, and the words landed like a door closing.

The Kids Grew Up. So Did the Roles.

The sequel, Practical Magic 2, arrives September 10 from Warner Bros. Director Susanne Bier — the Danish filmmaker behind HBO’s The Undoing, which paired her with Nicole Kidman — has shaped the story around a new generation. Kylie and her sister Antonia are now young women out of college, navigating the next chapter of the Owens family curse.

In the 1998 original, those two roles belonged to Wood and Alexandra Artrip. In the 2026 sequel, they’re played by Joey King and Maisie Williams. King addressed the recasting directly at the Los Angeles premiere, telling The Hollywood Reporter she’d had a “lovely” conversation with Wood. “I just was so appreciative of the support that she showed to me and to the rest of the cast,” King said. “She is so talented and so beautiful and she made this role so special when she was a young girl. I feel so grateful to be able to play Kylie at this age but I love Evan so much and I’m so appreciative of her kind words.”

It was gracious. It was sincere. And it landed entirely on one side of the exchange.

A Director’s Defense — and a Gap in the Story

Susanne Bier has a straightforward answer when asked why Wood wasn’t invited back. Speaking to Variety at the same Los Angeles premiere, Bier said: “It was not a personal thing. The kids in the story are right out of college, so it wasn’t really a question. We had to recast.”

The logic holds up on its own terms. Kylie and Antonia are supposed to be roughly 20 years old in the sequel. Wood was a child in 1998. Recasting is standard. Child actors age out. It happens in every long-running franchise on earth.

But “standard” and “silent” are two different things. Wood says she offered. She says she was told, not consulted. And she has a substantive creative objection that goes deeper than hurt feelings.

“The Book Would Have Made Sense”

Practical Magic 2 is adapted from The Book of Magic, Alice Hoffman’s 2003 novel — a direct sequel to her 1995 book that inspired the original film. The new movie tracks the Owens family saga forward, deepening the curse and pulling in new generations. But according to Wood, the adaptation isn’t following the book’s logic where it matters most.

“I read the book and it seems like they’re not following the book,” Wood told Entertainment Tonight. “I think in the book it would have made sense to bring me back; I think in the way they’re redoing it and approaching it, it didn’t make sense.”

That is a different kind of criticism entirely. It’s not “I’m sad I wasn’t in it.” It’s “the material I read suggests I should have been in it, and the version they’re making doesn’t reflect that.” Hoffman wrote The Book of Magic as a follow-up — it’s not a standalone. If the novel contains narrative reasons to keep Kylie in the story, and the adaptation drops that thread, then Wood’s exclusion isn’t just a casting decision. It’s a creative choice she was never given a chance to weigh in on, despite having played the character in what remains the most admired adaptation of Hoffman’s work.

The Original That Wouldn’t Die

The 1998 Practical Magic was not a hit on arrival. It opened to mixed reviews and a modest box office. But it did something harder than open big: it found its audience, and that audience never let go. A generation of viewers who were in middle school when it premiered still talk about it as one of the most distinctive American fairy-tale movies ever made — part domestic drama, part witches’-curse mythology, all held together by Bullock and Kidman’s impossible on-screen chemistry.

That kind of cult endurance is exactly what studios chase when they greenlight sequels twenty-eight years later. And that’s why Wood’s sense of exclusion cuts deeper than a routine recast. The franchise’s second life was built on the first life’s emotional residue — the same house, the same curse, the same two sisters at its center. The one thing you’d expect a studio to preserve was the link to the actors who made the original feel like a real family. The Owens sisters, in the public imagination, aren’t just characters. They’re Bullock and Kidman, yes — but they’re also Wood and Artrip, the kids who made the curse feel like it reached into a real household.

The Cast Behind the Recast

Joey King is no placeholder. She’s built a career that spans a major teen franchise, a genuinely sharp Netflix thriller, and a supporting turn in a high-profile Korean spy film. She’s earned the attention. Maisie Williams, of course, is Game of Thrones royalty — a breakout that defined a generation of television and never quite let go. Neither casting is a compromise.

The rest of the company is equally strong. Sandra Bullock returns as Sally Owens — the disciplined older sister whose trauma around love drives the curse’s grip on the family — rounding out a recent run that includes The Lost City, Bird Box, and The Blind Side, a movie that did more than any other to define the Bullock brand in the 2000s. Nicole Kidman returns as Gillian, the chaotic, magnetic younger sister, fresh off The Undoing and a career that has stretched from Dead Calm to full Hollywood royalty. Xolo Maridueña — known to superhero fans from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — plays Gideon, and Lee Pace, who played Ronan the Accuser in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, appears as Ian Wright. Dianne Wiest returns as Aunt Jet and Stockard Channing as Aunt Frances, bookending the original’s adult cast.

What’s Missing

Susanne Bier is an artist who tends to find the emotional undercurrent in even the most commercial material. Her filmography — Brothers, The Night Manager, The Undoing — reads like a case study in finding the human cost inside a genre wrapper. It’s a little hard to square that sensibility with a production that, by Wood’s account, never picked up the phone.

The movie itself hasn’t had a chance to answer yet. It opens September 10. The budget, according to industry reporting, sits around $75 million. The cast is formidable. The source material is beloved. But the public record right now — Wood’s disappointment, Bier’s deflection, King’s grace — tells a story the film hasn’t told its own yet.

What’s missing isn’t talent. It isn’t money. It’s the one ingredient no budget can buy: the sense that the people who made the original magic feel like the magic still belongs to them.

Practical Magic 2 opens in theaters September 10 from Warner Bros. Images via TMDB.