REBEL WITH A CAUSE
The first time Taylor Hickson met her onscreen love interest Amalia Holm, she was terrified. “So scared,” she admits on our long-distance video call, grinning at the memory now. “I wanted her to like me so badly!” The two actors were in LA, at the final round of auditions for Motherland: Fort Salem, Freeform’s new, female-focussed supernatural drama set in a diverse matriarchal society where witches are real and queerness is no big deal. A powerful young sorceress-in-training with a rebellious streak and a weakness for mysterious brunettes, Raelle Collar was the role of a lifetime. The pressure to impress – both the casting team and Amalia, who had already landed the part of Scylla – was intense. “I’m generally very surefooted,” Taylor assures me. “She genuinely made me nervous.”
During their lengthy chemistry tests, everything Taylor had carefully prepared was “thrown out of the window”, because Amalia’s line delivery was so original, so unexpected. “She wasn’t making the obvious choices, so I had to figure out a way to work around her, which is kind of how the beginning of a relationship is. You’re testing each other.” Long story
