SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the final season of Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
If there was one role that might bring Jennifer Stone back to the small screen, it would be Harper Finkle.
After saying goodbye to Wizards of Waverly Place, Stone went to nursing school. She’s been largely working in the field since. She didn’t expect to be reprising the role nearly 15 years later with former co-stars Selena Gomez and Gregg Sulkin, even after the series was rebooted two years ago.
“When Wizards Beyond first came out, I had a conversation with David, and he was kind of like, ‘Hey, if it makes sense down the line, maybe you’ll be on for an episode.’ So I kind of, to be honest, mourned it and was like, ‘Okay, I put Harper to bed like 15 years ago. She can live back in the original show,’” she remembered. “I was pleasantly surprised when I got the call to come back.”
While Wizards Beyond has welcomed original characters back to the franchise, their roles have been limited, as the ethos of the show has been to focus on the next generation of characters at the center of the story.
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That is, beyond David Henrie’s Justin Russo, who is a pivotal part of the series. By the final season, audiences have learned that Billie — the wizard protege Alex dropped off with her brother and his family in Season 1 — is actually her daughter. In the Season 2 finale, Alex throws herself through a dimensional rift in order to save the rest of her family, and viewers find out her fate in the second episode of the four-part series conclusion.
That’s where Harper comes in. Alex has somehow ended up in an alternate universe. A limbo, if you will. Here, she’s still living with her best friend and dating her former flame Mason Greyback (Gregg Sulkin). Alex is very confused, but Harper is positively gleeful as she tries to hide from Alex that she believes Mason is on his way over to propose. She, unsurprisingly, doesn’t succeed for long.
While it is an extremely brief appearance, Stone tells Deadline it was not only nostalgic to be back in that world, it also allowed her to explore some of the Wizards ideas that had been left on the cutting room floor many years ago. She recalls “rumblings” of potential spinoffs when the original series ended, including a series “where Harper and Alex lived in their own apartment, the Wizards apartments,” just as they do in this little fantasyland. They explain that they use a gag wand to convince other tenants she’s magic.
“So it was cool on multiple levels. One, it got to entertain the ‘what if’ in this alternate reality, if that had happened. And, two, I love that not only have the characters matured, but the relationship has, too,” she said.
Stone has a firm idea of who Harper would be at this stage of life. She had to consider the possibility for episodes of Wizards that depicted her character in the future. The biggest change about her is “she’s just more focused with her creativity and that confidence,” the actress adds.
In the end, Alex and Harper aren’t reunited for long. We learn that, in fact, Mason is dead. Harper is (probably) not real either. He’s really there to guide Alex back home. The scene is painfully short, but it is a warm nod to the original franchise and a positive sendoff for the three-season continuation.
And anyway, Stone now knows she could never forget Harper.
“It was eerie. I was literally saying, ‘It’s so weird because I haven’t played this character in 15 years or something.’ It was like muscle memory. It was literally like riding a bike. You just jump right into it,” she described. “It was so cool, but also just strange. Wonderfully weird is the best way I can put it…to see all of us slip right back into the dynamic we had when we were 15 or 16.”
