Thora Birch Talks About Mayfair Witches, Hocus Pocus and Now and Then (Exclusive)

When Thora Birch makes her Mayfair Witches debut in the second episode of the AMC series’ second season on Jan. 12, it won’t be her first brush with Anne Rice’s pulpy supernatural world. Way back in the early ’90s when she was a child actor best known for her roles in family-friendly films like All I Want for Christmas and Hocus Pocus, Birch says she was initially considered to play child blood-sucker Claudia in director Neil Jordan’s 1994 film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.

“I took a number of meetings with the director,” Birch, 42, tells PEOPLE. But at 12 years old, Birch wasn’t ready to play an adult woman trapped in the body of a little girl, and the role ultimately went to Kirsten Dunst.

“At the time, I was still quite innocent in a lot of ways,” Birch recalls. “I grew up fast being a child actor, but there were still parts of that character and things that were required of her that I still felt were too adult, or I just didn’t connect up with it. I had no frame of personal reference for those deeper, more complex emotions that that character had to embody. So, for me, it was just like, ‘This is a little icky.’ But I did love it. I’m a huge fan of the movie and the show as well.”

With Mayfair Witches, however, Birch finally gets to enter Rice’s interconnected gothic world. The actress admits she was less familiar with the late author’s trilogy of novels about a dynasty of wealthy New Orleans witches than she was with Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. But, she says, the first season of AMC’s TV adaptation “kind of sucked me in.”

“I love the Anne Rice universe,” she says. “I really appreciate how she treats New Orleans as its own character, and the show really benefits from shooting down there. It’s beautiful eye candy, it’s fun characters and it’s themes that never really go out of fashion: the occult, alchemy, you know? It’s sexy stuff.”

Birch joins season 2, which loosely adapts Rice’s 1993 novel Lasher, as Gifford Mayfair, a distant cousin of the show’s head witch in charge, Rowan (Alexandra Daddario). “She’s part of the Mayfair empire and she’s a very wealthy, prominent figure in the world,” Birch says of the show’s version of the character. “But if she had a quarter of the powers Rowan has, I think she would be over the moon.”

“She has this sense of an impending doom and she doesn’t know if it’s for her or her family or something bigger, but she knows something’s coming,” she continues. “But also, you would expect her to say that anyway, because she’s just dying to be a real part of it, the supernatural powers of it all. So, yeah, because of that, she’s been more socially reclusive. We get the sense she doesn’t really get along with her husband too well and she’s just been hiding out in her beach house and just becoming slightly more hermetic.”

There is, of course, a metatextual element to Birch’s casting as a Mayfair witch. One of her most memorable early roles was in Disney’s Hocus Pocus, in which she went head-to-head with a trio of hilariously batty sorceresses played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy. But Birch says the connection to the 1993 cult Halloween fave wasn’t top of mind when she took on the role of Gifford.

“It was more like, ‘Would you like to play in this space and finally enter the Anne Rice world and revisit working with AMC and just have a good time working with Jack Huston, who I’ve known for a while,’ ” she says. “So, in many ways it felt like an easy fit. Hocus Pocus is certainly part of that, but it wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. It was more, ‘This is an intriguing character in a fun world.’ ”

Hocus Pocus is just one of a number of Birch’s films that have become touchstones for people of her generation. In a sense, when you look at the arc of her career, there are definite flashpoints that map neatly onto millennials’ coming-of-age, with All I Want for Christmas and Hocus Pocus representing childhood, Monkey Trouble and Now and Then representing adolescence and American Beauty and Ghost World representing the angsty teen years.

Birch chalks this up, in part, to the monoculture that existed in the ’90s, before the Internet and streaming fragmented everyone’s viewing habits. “We were all watching the same stuff, so we all had a similar frame of reference,” she says. “As far as the arc of my personal career, I just think like with a lot of people who started out so young, there’s a mirroring in your professional and personal lives. So, all those points that you mentioned were things that I was, in real time, experiencing and I did grow up in front of the camera.”

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As millennials transition to mid-life, Birch says she’s noticed a resurgence in appreciation for Now and Then. The 1995 dramedy features a split narrative following four women (played by Melanie Griffith, Demi Moore, Rosie O’Donnell and Rita Wilson) recalling their childhood in the 1970s. Birch played the younger version of Griffith’s character alongside Christina Ricci, Gaby Hoffman and the late Ashleigh Aston Moore.

“It was a film that had a huge impact at the time, especially among young girls,” Birch says. “But then, I dunno, I didn’t hear about it too much. And now it seems like the fans are recalling it and dusting it off the shelf and sharing it with younger audiences. I feel like there’s a lot of love emerging.”

That may be due in part to rumors — fanned by Griffith, Moore, O’Donnell and Wilson’s recent reunion at Elle’s 2024 Women in Hollywood celebration in November — of a potential sequel. For the record, Birch says she’d be “intrigued” to see how a sequel would work, and that she’s “heard some rumors about some pretty prominent writers that might want to take a stab at something like that.”

For now though, Birch is excited about her current era. In 2022, she made her directorial debut with the Lifetime original movie The Gabby Petito Story, and she has several projects she’s hoping to direct in the near future, including an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 2004 novel Mr. Paradise and Mother Truckers, which she describes as “a very broad female-driven comedy.” Last summer, she also starred alongside Imogen Poots in Kristen Stewart’s own directorial debut, the upcoming biographical The Chronology of Water, based on writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name.

As a performer, Birch says she’d like to delve more into comedic roles. But at the same time, she’s hesitant to define this era of her career.

“I try not to say, ‘Oh, I just want to do this type of movie, or that type of movie,’ because it’s fun to play in all the different spaces,” she explains. “I try not to make a big plan. For a lot of people that works, but for me, in my experience, I’ve found that it’s better not to try to manifest too deeply, because you still have to be open to the new surprises that the universe will introduce to you.”