Justice Smith IS SIMON

† BY ALANA JOLI ABBOTT

Q:You play Simon, the party caster, a half-elf sorcerer. What can you tell us about him?

JUSTICE SMITH: Simon doesn’t really have a lot of control over what he can cast. Sorcerers are born with magic in their blood and run on intuition. Wizards are scholars, and they learn magic. Simon’s a descendant of wizarding blood, the scholarly line, and he is an incredibly powerful sorcerer. The only thing that really gets in his way is his lack of self-confidence. So he goes out on this journey to learn how to be better at that.

Gamers know that we keep our casters in the back because they’re the characters that are most likely to get injured in combat. Did you end up having that kind of role?

We kept it in line with the game. Any time Simon is on the offensive, it’s always through his magic from a distance. But I did get to do a lot of stunt work. Not really fighting, but a lot of falling, I’ll say. So that was fun.

What can you tell us about your magic?

It’s really cool when you do a spell on another person, and that person just has to act like it’s affecting them. It feels like when you’re in school and you’re playing pretend on the playground. You make up rules, like “I have a forcefield, and your spell bounces off!” It was exactly like that:

“I use a spell that froze you in place. You can’t move.”

Were you a gamer before the film?

I’m a huge gamer. I love video games specifically, but I also love board games. I do a lot of escape rooms. We played [D&D] once with the cast and the directors before we did the film. We did a campaign that was what would happen after the sequence of events in the film. So we improvised as our characters and created a story. It was like research because we got to delve into our character’s psychology more. D&D is very similar to acting, where you create your own character and create your own backstory based on a script. You feel them out, and you learn things about them along the way.