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Baby titan skulls, too many coffees, and …Barbie Lilith? Stars of The Owl House dish behind-the-scenes secrets

The stars of Disney+'s beloved show The Owl House tell stories about working on the show

Features by Jim McDermott, Contributing writer

Published on Wed Jul 10 2024

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It's been one year since the series finale of Disney's The Owl House animated series, and - fittingly enough - the show about witches congrating a house - continues to haunt our minds here now over a year after its end. That's why we're revisiting a rare reunion of many of the show's cast and crew which occured during a fan panel at the 2023 Comic-Con International: San Diego, and relating what happened beyond just the hundreds of us in the room this time last year.

In the hour-long panel, cast members from everyone’s favorite show about us weirdos shared behind the scenes stories that were heartwarming, eye-opening, and, in at least one case, horrifying.

Sarah-Nicole Robles (Luz Noceda) admitted that Luz could be a handful to play. “Luz is very energetic,” Robles said. “And sometimes I was very tired.”

Playing the role, she revealed, “took a lot of coffees sometimes.” (Season three, she said, was much easier: “Pandemic? Emo? I have this!”)

Robles also noted plenty of surprises along the way, including her character’s bisexuality. “In the library episode I was like, Is she flirting with both of them?” she recalls. “And [creator] Dana [Terrace] was like, ‘Yeah, she’s bisexual.’”

“Oh,” Robles told her. “It would have been nice to know!”

There were a number of scenes Robles wished she could have taped again. Given the requirements of post-pandemic safety, cast members were always recording by themselves, which meant you didn’t necessarily know how they were playing moments. “That scene with Hunter in season 3 where I’m like, ‘Everybody’s going to hate me,’ I would have said half of those lines different. Because I didn’t hear the other actor’s lines.”

For her part, Cissy Jones (Lilith) revealed that she never got full episodes, just her lines, so often she was totally in the dark about what happened. “People would be like, ‘oh my God, can you believe…?” and I’d say ‘No no no!’ Because I would only get, like, ‘Hello, sister.’”

Jones also remembered the moment she came into read her lines for ‘Agony of the Witch’: “I did not have a chance to read my sides the night before, because I had been working very late,” she explains, and she assumed the day was going to be more wicked banter with her sister. “And they were like, ‘Oh. Sit down.’”

“They talked about the angst, the years of pent-up jealousy and frustration and sibling rivalry, and just rage that went into that moment,” Jones shared. “Getting to scream that at the top of my lungs—and I don’t think they expected me to scream it—it was so real and so raw.” It turned out to be her “favorite recording moment” of the show.

Avi Roque (Raine) calls coming to The Owl House “a full circle moment for me.” Before transitioning, they found that they were getting roles that were not right for them. “A lot of my acting early in my career was not being my true authentic self.” But they also noted that when they chased the roles that felt more authentic, “the work started coming.”

As they transitioned, they kept working, but the chance to be on Owl House arrived at a special moment: “My voice had settled.” The experience of getting to perform like that “was just profound.”

On the horrifying front, production associate and MC Rebecca Rose pointed out that all the smaller Titan skulls amongst the bones upon which the Boiling Islands are built were actually King’s siblings. Based on the widespread gasps, many people in the audience had clearly not realized this.

A number of the cast also told funny stories of personal horror, when trying stuff out on Terrace. When Jones auditioned she thought it would be fun to have Lilith adopt a very dramatic tone of voice in public situations, and then drop it in private. When Terrace heard it, she said, “Don’t do that.”

Likewise, at one point Terrace said to Robles, “Can you not?”

Said Jones, “Being an actor is like professionally throwing spaghetti against a wall.” But she revealed, it does have upsides, some enormously unexpected: “I commissioned an artist to do a print for one of the signings, and she said, ‘Do you want Barbie Lilith?’ I was like, ‘WHAT?’”

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