The Magnus Archives - MAG Cast Q&A - Retrospective #1

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

We kick off the mid-season break for The Magnus Archives with a retrospective look, as Jonny poses a few questions to various cast members, past and present, about their involvement with the show.Featuring:Imogen Harris, Ian Hayles, Evelyn Hewitt, Mike LeBeau, Ben Meredith, Lydia Nicholas, Chioma Nwalioba, Fay Roberts, Sasha Sienna, Jonathan Sims, Sue Sims, Alasdair Stuart & Frank VossContent Warnings:Explicit languageSpoilers for show to dateMentions: claustrophobia, insects & arachnids, zombies, clowns, environmental destruction, existential dread, isolation, thalassophobia, supernatural/paranormal encounters, body horrorEdited by Nico Vettese, Jeffrey Nils-Gardner & Alexander J NewallProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesFor more information on this weeks sponser visit http://bit.ly/RhythmofWar for more infoCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop and https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill.You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up.

Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca Hello, Lowri here. I'm the producer for the Magnus Archives. Welcome to the first episode of our hiatus. Over the next six weeks, we'll be releasing new weekly content, behind-the-scenes episodes, bonus episodes, starting with this cast Q&A. Enjoy! What is your personal fear or nightmare? My name is Faye Roberts and I play Alice Daisy Tonner. Doing the buried episode was difficult because I'm not someone who's great with confined spaces but you know I've learned to manage most of my phobias I have to say but the ones that have survived having beaten off confined spaces and swimming pools and wasps a lot more chill about wasps than I used to be zombies and clowns and

obviously a combination of the two zombie clownss, is a particular get-that-the-fuck-away-from-me thing. Some of this comes from a series of nightmares I had. This is going to sound utterly unbelievable, but basically I had a series of zombie apocalypse nightmares from the year 2000 up to the year 2016, whereupon they stopped. Make of that what you will. So short version zombie clowns. It's that whole uncanny valley thing, I think. You can tell from the body language that they're not happy, but they're painted to look happy and everyone else is laughing around you. Nah, that's disturbing. I'm Lydia Nicholas and I play Melanie in the Magnus Archives. What my personal fear or nightmare is kind of depends on how you're defining the terms.

I developed a really terrible phobia of spiders as a child when I accidentally broke a spider egg sack with my toddler hands and this wave of thousands of semi-formed spiderlings burst out and were covering my hands and my face and and the first thing that spiders do when they hatch is they release a thread so they can float away in the wind so of course they like floated into my face and got in my mouth and eyes and stuff and I mean that was terrifying no doubt and I was like sickeningly scared of spiders for a while but I was able to work through it over the course of many years

of trying to push myself to get closer and closer to them until eventually I can kind of play with spiders now so even stuff that scares me like that I kind of see a route to overcoming even if I haven't overcome it yet but the thing that I absolutely cannot get over is sense of eco-terror of extinction, I guess. The sense of everything being dead, of things being lost that can never be regained or rebuilt. You know, the slow work of millions of years of tiny creatures building up coral reefs just being ripped to shreds by dragnets. Like, that sense of loss is something I still have nightmares about, I guess. My name is Chioma Waliova, and I play Annabelle Kane in The Magnus Archives. My personal fear is that one day something might happen somewhere, I don't know what,

that would leave me feeling incredibly lonely with no friends or family and I don't know, it's something that really scares me because I feel like no one deserves to be lonely, everyone deserves to have someone and the idea of not having someone I find so scary. Hello, I am Ben Meredith and I play Elias Bouchard in the Magnus Archives. The one that I am willing to talk about is A Fear of the Sea because the sea is terrifying because it's huge and absolutely doesn't care and will just kill you really quickly without really any indication and also you can't see what's in the sea so genuinely one of the freakiest experiences is being in shallow water not wearing any shoes because i know about lugworms and stuff and they're horrible and the things that come from the sea are cool but also have evolved in a completely alien environment to me, as a land person,

and so are just deeply, deeply unsettling. Have you had any sinister or supernatural experiences? Hi, I'm Alistair Stewart, and I play Peter Lucas, Tim's favourite kayaking instructor, the enigmatic Aikido sensei who taught Martin how to live again, Martin's other dad, and the unsung hero of the Magnus Archives, that kind of thing. When I was a kid,

getting ready for school, my dad and I heard someone flushing the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. Now, given that my mum was getting the car, which was not in the upstairs bathroom, and no one else was in the house, that was interesting. Same house bathroom and no one else was in the house that was interesting same house, different year

I was drifting off to sleep when a female voice very sweet, kind of young definitely not my mum, definitely not my sister or gran who didn't live with us said, hello my entire body locked in a spasm of existential terror

and I couldn't open my eyes because what if I did, and someone was there? And I finally did. No one was. A few years after that, before I learned about pareidolia, the condition where we see or perceive pattern that is not there, I was absolutely convinced there was someone standing behind a tree on a wall outside my bedroom window in our holiday flat in York. Stone still, slightly larger than a human would be, outlined by the streetlight, defined by the leaves, not moving, just watching me. Oh, I also want Sir A Ghost to flicker into existence, head to toe, in sections like a rotating sign. Seemed like a nice chap. He smiled at me.

I have no idea what any of these experiences were. I do know there are rational explanations for all of them, and I know, especially at night, how the brain can perceive light and space and time very differently. So if these were paranormal experiences, I'm both grateful to have had them, and even more grateful they were finite. Hello everyone, my name is Evelyn Hewitt, and I am the voice of the Not-Sasha on the Magnus Archives. One summer, I was given the summer job of painting an atrium at a large countryside hotel. This was one of those large country mansion wedding venues and they wanted beautiful lime lemony sandstone vista painted in their hallway to look like some sort of Mediterranean courtyard. So I was painting bricks all day but at night I was allowed to stay

in the hotel so that I could get my full day's work in and save me having to get a lift from my dad back and forth each day. So at night I would sleep in this hotel alone, save for the caretaker who lived in a little house off-site, and I would have the run of the place. And it was echoey, long corridors, dark corners, small noises and creaks and sounds in this very very old house and I even found I hadn't known about this but I've even found a secret corridor behind a bookshelf very very spooky I thought I'd discovered it for the first time but when I found the accounts boxes hidden away in the secret cupboard I I realised it was just a storage cupboard rather than some forgotten tomb or anything like that.

I'm Ian Hales, and I get to play the wonderful Trevor Herbert in the Magnus Archives. I lived in a place that was very, very old, and we had had things happen you know um doors would open by themselves one really weird thing an entire cabinet of glassware filled with water not the cabinet but all of the glassware filled with water and it wasn't like oh there was a leak in it i remember this so vividly it was when i was a child and all of the glassware filled to the brim with water. We spent like the afternoon having to clear it out. That was a weird one. Yeah. I've had spookiness. I'm spooky.

Do you engage with horror as a genre? Hi. My name's Mike Lebeau and I play Timothy Stoker in the Magnus Archives. No. I know I do not engage any more than I have to engage. I really don't like horror. It's not my genre. Like, I appreciate horror and when my friends want to go watch a

horror movie I'll go with them. When they want to watch one on Netflix I'll watch it. Like, during Halloween I will play scary games on Twitch. But as a person, do I choose horror? No. No, I absolutely do not choose horror as a genre. Genuinely, no. Sue Sims. I play Gertrude Robinson in the Magnus Archives. I like some horror. For me, it's a sub-genre of fantasy, and I do enjoy fantasy a lot. I've never been a great fan of what you might call flesh horror. Horrible things happen, people get skinned alive and all this sort of stuff. I was teaching once in a comprehensive in outer London, in Barnet. Seven times a week for English wasn't fun,

particularly this Year 8 and then year nine class. I had them last thing on a Friday afternoon, which any teacher and many pupils will know is not really a time you get the maximum benefit out of actually teaching. So in order to control this rather roundy class, I used to promise them that if they behaved well during the week, I would read them a horror story that Friday, each Friday afternoon. They adored horror, and the grimmer and nastier and fleshier the horror, the more they liked it. I used to go around all the charity shops buying things called the Second Pan Book of Great Ghost stories and and the third fontana book of terrifying horror stories and things like that and i would actually look through to find the nastiest stories i could find they absolutely lapped them up the more intellectual type of horror they didn't have any time for at all which i prefer my favorite author in the genre is M.R. James, who I think is astoundingly good.

I loved Lovecraft when I was in my 20s, late teens, early 20s. I think I've rather grown out of him now. He's too fond of emotive, empty adjectives, words like horrifying and terrifying and gruesome and all the rest of it, and I prefer the slightly more subtle way of presenting things. I love horror. I have a thesis that horror is the first genre that we engage with as human beings because most of the fairy tales we know are horror tales. You think about Little Red Riding Hood, that's a horror tale.

That's basically a slasher picture with a final girl. You've got things like Snow White being poisoned and being brought back to life. And when you actually read the actual original Grimm's Tales, it's even worse. There's some even worse horror tropes in there, especially with Snow White. It's even worse. There's some even worse horror tropes in there, especially with Snow White. So yeah, absolutely. My favourite

horror films are things like Poltergeist. It's a brilliant horror film. Very scary for something that is supposedly a family film, really. Love that kind of thing. I do engage with it. My name's Sasha Sienna

and I play Georgie Barker on the Magnus Archives. Being married to Jonathan Spooksalot Sims, it is very hard not to engage with horror as a genre. I used to be a primary school teacher way back in the years of distant past and so I have a very good understanding of Goosebumps, which has actually made me surprisingly genre literate. I really have a lot of time for Goosebumps. And I've always enjoyed quite a traditional spooky ghost story of a kind of Victorian Christmas fire type. But I'd say since being involved with Magnus and obviously since living with Johnny, I have become a lot more genre aware and by necessity a lot more kind of immersed in the wider genre. I really like horror that's also comedy I'd say that's my favourite I really liked things like

What We Do in the Shadows is really more comedy that's about horror tropes but things like a film called Housebound which is more like a horror film but that is funny I really enjoy stuff like that. What is your favourite or a funny memory of being involved in the Magnus Archives? This is Frank Voss, and I voiced Basira Hussain in the Magnus Archives. No, I've never once had fun. It's been dreadful. Nothing enjoyable has ever happened. No.

Casper's stealing a bag of treats from me or something that cat is wily he laid down in my lap was being super cute and then the second i let my guard down he snatched the treats from like next to me and ran off what i've been enjoying recently is hearing the outtake stuff some instance of which i'd actually forgotten so it's been really nice oh yeah that's mine that's me oh yeah okay sometimes in daisy voice sometimes in me voice but i have one which i've shared on social media again recently where it was the scene with breakin and hope the one where daisy gets chucked in the coffin and i had to do hysterical laughter on cue which turned out so realistic that they at least one of the actors thought i was corpsing and

was put off and thought that we had to start the scene again and like after a while he was like oh oh you're you're acting yes yes i am that's really realistic so that one kind of stays with me but in terms of favorite oh it was for my first recordings of season four and entombed was as intense to record as i'm sure you can imagine it was a lot. So I came downstairs going, I need a cup of tea. I'm not going to drive home straight away. And people had gathered to be recording Rusty Cool Gaming. And that was the first time I met Helen.

And she had said that she'd started getting into Magnus as a fan. And then there was a bit where we realized that we didn't know each other and I think it was either Johnny or Alex introduced us and she did a full Macaulay Culkin stroke the scream clasping her hands to her cheek and rocking backwards from where she'd been sitting on the floor going Daisy's alive which was the best response. I think I just went, spoilers. I think my favourite memories of Magnus are the early ones. Me and Johnny under a blanket, just making each other absolutely crack up while Alex begs us to stay on track, and then getting him to actually crack himself a few times. I think it's incredible how, with the work of editing,

and, I mean, it's always the case, I suppose, in media production, the amount of fun that we have doing it doesn't always come across in the immediate format where all the characters are so serious and scared and angry. But I think the fans still have picked up how much real joy we get out of working together. So somehow that comes across. And yeah, that means most of the memories are me laughing with my mates

over stuff that honestly doesn't work as a story because it's just being daft with people I love. There are loads of times in the studio where funny things happen. Like, you get things like flubs and stuff like that, or, you know, someone screws up a line and you're like, ha ha ha, what did you say there? Ha ha ha. You know, there's stuff like that, and that's always a good time. If I were to pick a specific memory memory it's a little bit morbid but one of my earliest funny memories of magnus was in season one when lottie's character sasha became the not sasha and i remember being there when we were literally piling so many duvets on

top of her i don't know if at the point this is released the Rusty Bits episode will be released but there is actually footage of that happening that I shot on my phone at the time and I just remember like cocooning her in these blankets and me and Ben and Alex were just stood there looking at each other the entire time like is this going to be okay? Like Alex had to pre-warn all of his neighbors that this was going to okay like alex had to pre-warn all of his neighbors that this was going to happen and then we had to get very serious obviously because lottie had to do the scream which we were all inevitably waiting for but when she came out she was just she was just so humble she was like can you get me out please or something like that and i just

broke down laughing i i can't believe I didn't record that bit. I actually only record the scream. But, like, it was ridiculous. We all laughed about it, like, loads and loads afterwards. So if I were to pick one particular memory, that would probably be the one. Like, there were so many in between, but that would be the one that stands out for me.

What are your thoughts on the fan response to your character? Astonished joy? Yeah, I think that about covers it. The direction Alex gave me for the character the first time I sat in for him was Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, as played by Stephen Fry, and I absolutely ran with that. I don't think either of us expected Peter to be anything more than a one-season character that everyone would be really happy to see yeeted into the heart of the sun, but he's still here, and it's great. The nights of the big Peter, the fan response, the glorious fan-in about Peter and Elias, shout out to my internet husband Ben, it's all been so welcoming and so enthusiastic, and it's all just so ridiculously well done that I've been in a state of pleased awe for basically the last two years.

So many amazing fans have done nothing but make Marguerite and I feel welcome, and that's astounding, and it's brilliant, and did I say thank you yet? If not, thank you. Hi, my name's Imogen Harris. I play Helen Richardson. The fan response to my character is just blown away. It's extraordinary, The level of creativity and imagination and collaboration and brilliance of the fans. I just, I suppose my route to Magnus was through improv, which is how I came to know Johnny and Alex and Hannah and everyone.

And as I'm sure you know, the golden rule of improv is yes and. So you take what someone else has done, you affirm it and you add to it. and the fans are just the most beautiful example of yes anding that I've ever seen just the the way they've built on and enriched and enlarged and expanded it's just it's really amazing and it's oh it sounds like a cliche but it is such a privilege to be a tiny little part of that it has been absolutely lovely I'm feeling so overwhelmed by how loved Annabelle is and I just think it's so brilliant when I look at all the fan arts that come out of it. I'm just like wow everyone's so talented. Annabelle looks stunning and I can't wait to dress up as her one day because she obviously she's got so much style. She's amazing. I'm surprised, I would say,

because everybody loves a good villain, don't they? You know, if you think about Jafar or Scar or, to a certain extent, Gaston or, you know, any of the sort of, like, classic sort of Disney villains and the general fan response to those, yeah, I am broadly unsurprised by it. And I think it's lovely that people enjoy

the character that i play i mean i don't want to be specifically told about everything that they enjoy about the character that i play but the fact that they enjoy it is fine how did your first recording compare to your last my first recording was very different to my most recent recording because apart from anything else we were recording was very different to my most recent recording because apart from anything else we were in a studio and now we're all recording at home so it's a very different situation. In my first recording it was the first bit of audio voice acting that I'd ever done before mostly I'd been performing live on stages and things so I came to it with I don't think that Alex or Johnny would have said the word stilted,

but only because they're being quite polite, but there's a particularly different way of speaking when you're acting live on a stage to when you're acting doing voice audio work, because on audio work you want to make it seem more naturalistic. So I think the first time that I did that, I did the recording, it sounded probably quite put on in context. When I first started recording with Magnus, it was nearly four years ago now. It's really gone so quickly, and it's strange to look back on those memories

of recording in people's living rooms and under duvets in people's hallways and look to where Magnus and Rusty Quill have arrived now, it feels genuinely like the end of an era for this show that really started out as a passion project and has just come a very long way. A lot has changed between first recording and the last. For instance, in the first one, I was in someone else's house with a blanket over my head, and right now I'm in my own home wrapped in a blanket. So it's a continual process of evolution and change. Yeah.

The first recording I did, and indeed one or two ones after that as well, were in a situation where there was really no proper recording studio. The first place I went was a flat in Hackney, belonging to a friend of Alex. The actual recording was in the little corridor leading from the living area to the front door. The bathroom was off it. And in order to get a really nice, absorbent, whatever one calls it, this all soundproofing quality, there were duvets hung all over the place. At one point, one of the duvets fell off,

and we had to stop the recording and start it again. So, yes, that was a very different situation. Give a ten-second pitch on why your character should survive or be resurrected for the season five finale. They're on their way to murder a wannabe god that has destroyed reality. What possible word could better describe John, Martin and their merry band than being oh so very lonely? Do you need a door?

Come on. You always need a door. It's fucking Tim. Am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to leave that as my answer? need a door. It's fucking Tim. Am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to leave that as my answer? It's Tim. Like, duh, of course he should be resurrected for the final.

Nepotism. Gertrude is rather like the coward described in Julius Caesar. The coward dies many deaths before his own. The brave man dies but once. But I don't think Gertrude is a coward and I think before his own. The brave man dies but once. But I don't think Gertrude is a coward, and I think the fans like her,

so I think I ought to come back. And if I don't, I might just come to visit you. This episode is distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 international license. For more information, visit RustyQuill.com, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook or email us at mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening. To be continued... to the constant shallows of the Pure Lake, and the magic-battered slopes of the Shattered Plains. Spirits and knights, scholars and demons, enchanted swords,

and even the gods themselves all march towards a magical showdown in this newest Stormlight Archive volume, Rhythm of War. This fourth volume ramps up the tensions that Sanderson began with his New York Times bestsellers The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and Oathbringer, leading everyone to choose a side, and it's available to purchase right now. Search for Rhythm of War or visit the link in this episode's description and get started on your own epic journey,

knowing that at the same time you're helping to support your favourite horror podcast. Thanks. Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchard from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling, and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks, so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a classic whodunit, and sometimes you want to get

wrapped up in a twisted new mystery where the tension is high, and you just can't stop listening until you find out what happens next audible can take you places only you can imagine and whenever you want on a run doing errands commuting or just relaxing at home and it's not just audiobooks audible also gives you binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive originals with thousands of included titles you can listen to all you want and more get added every week so if you're into secrets and suspense or you want to explore any other genre remember there's more to imagine when you listen on audible your first audiobook is absolutely free when you sign up for a free 30-day

trial at audible.ca this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnabon pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.