‘Coven Academy’ Stars Spill on That Briar Bombshell, Finale Twists & Season 2

Being a teenager is hard. Being a teenage witch is even harder.

When Briar (Malina Weissman) rolls up to Crescent Veil Academy in New Orleans, she has no idea just how much her life will change. Over the course of Coven Academy Season 1, Briar finds friends, finds love, and finds out shocking secrets that change everything. (Warning: Coven Academy Season 1 spoilers ahead.)

Let’s start with the massive Coven Academy bombshell: Briar’s birth mother is Miss Graves (Tiffani Thiessen), aka Emma. Briar comes to New Orleans searching for answers about her mother’s murder. Mary (Cecelia Deacon), who was once a member of a coven with Emma and Tamora (Keegan Connor Tracy), raised Briar.

“It was honestly heartwarming because I think we all kind of speculated that energy when we started shooting,” Weissman told TV Insider regarding the twist. The Coven Academy cast didn’t learn about Briar’s mom twist until later in the season. In the finale, Briar and her friends begin to put the pieces together about the birth-mother twist.

Disney / David Astorga

“My guess is that something was happening that made her feel she needed to separate to keep her safe,” Thiessen said as to why Emma would give up her daughter. Obviously, this revelation will have an impact on everyone moving forward, especially Briar. “I think a lot of the show is about identity and how you come to be yourself and your confident self. So I’m excited to see where she goes and what decisions she makes and how they go wrong,” Weissman noted.

As for Emma, it’s going to be even harder for her to stay away from Briar. “She’s always wanting answers,” Thiessen recognized about Briar, but those answers could put her in harm’s way.

One reveal Coven Academy has saved for a potential Season 2? Briar’s dad. No one, save for creator Tim Federle, knows who Briar’s dad is. “I have a few theories of what could happen in the future,” Leftwich said, but she didn’t want to share out of fear she might be… correct!

Another major twist in Season 1 involved Mr. Peter Cole (Devon Sawa). The new professor isn’t exactly who he says he is at first. Turns out, William Bixton (Tahmoh Penikett), a shape-shifting warlock, has been impersonating Peter and holding the real Peter captive. Until the big reveal, this essentially gave Sawa the opportunity to play two very different characters.

Disney / Eric Milner

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“That was the other thing that kind of drew me to it,” Sawa told TV Insider. “I always look, when I’m looking for a project, I’m looking for something that I haven’t done before or something that’s very challenging. I love to do horror, but it’s got to be something different to it.”

Briar’s mom bombshell isn’t the only family twist in the first season. Mason (Nathaniel Logan McIntyre), the brother Sasha (Jordan Leftwich) thought was dead, is actually alive. Technically, he’s a vampire, so he’s undead, but you get the drift. Sasha is not a fan of vampires, but this discovery will have Sasha going to great lengths to save her brother. “Oh, I think she’s about to go all the way to the end,” Leftwich said. Could Sasha eventually accept her brother for the vampire he is now? “I think with time she might be able to because she’s able to accept her girls with all of their flaws,” she admitted.

When it comes to Tegan (Ora Duplass), her backstory is only briefly mentioned in the first season, and Duplass is excited about what Season 2 could mean for her character. “I think she has a really complicated situation at home where she deals with anxiety and ADHD, and her parents saw that as a flaw in her, and that made her different,” Duplass said. “And so that’s evidently why she got sent to Coven Academy because she was different. Turns out she has powers. I don’t know where it’ll go, but I know that she definitely has found more of a family at Coven Academy than she did have at home.”

The last moments of the Season 1 finale leave the door wide open for more stories in this new and exciting world. There’s a storm looming over New Orleans, but Briar, Sasha, and Tegan’s coven is stronger than ever.

Thiessen hopes to see “more of the relationships between the girls, their backstories, my backstory, and, of course, my relationship with my daughter that all of a sudden [has] come forth, more of my relationships with, you know, whoever the birth father is. I mean, it’s endless.”

Coven Academy, Season 1, Streaming Now, Disney+, Hulu, and Freeform on Demand