Shadowhunters season 2: The Sarah Hyland – Seelie Queen debate

Sarah Hyland

When we first heard that Sarah Hyland would be appearing on Shadowhunters season 2, we wondered if she’d be the Seelie Queen. However, we didn’t anticipate the casting would happen like this! When we first saw the younger version of the character, we actually did start to give up on this a little bit and assume that this version of the character would be the one to stick around.

As it turns out, though, that’s not the case — Hyland is playing the older version of the leader of the Seelie Court, and the video below is your further proof of that! You can see in here a quick scene between the Seelie Queen and Simon Lewis, and in terms of content it’s interesting to see what the dynamic between the two has now become in the aftermath of them spending time together previously in “The Fair Folk” earlier this season. It was then that the Queen proposed the alliance to Simon, one that he was not altogether keen on taking … which in turn led to the conflict and confrontations that you ended up seeing over the course of that episode. In some ways, Simon not taking the deal devastated his relationship with Clary, though taking it would’ve had consequences of its own.

So why have an older iteration of the Seelie Queen here? The first thing to remember is that obviously, neither one of these Queens represent her actual age, and she possesses the ability to adjust her appearance as she sees fit. It obviously makes sense, given that this is the real world, for her to present herself as a young woman in order to not look out of place. If she was a young girl, there’d probably be people carting her off left and right in order to try and bring her back to a parent.

Still, we do think it’s a somewhat curious choice to have an older Seelie Queen when we don’t necessarily need one, and the dichotomy of having such a seemingly young person with so much power was super-interesting. We do also know that the show wanted to get a good role for Hyland, given that she’s a huge guest star and she has real-life romantic ties to Dominic Sherwood. We just wonder if there was a different role that she could have taken on. (We should obviously add in the caveat that we’re not a book reader, and we intentionally try to avoid book spoilers. We don’t know if there was a better role out there.)

The appearance of Hyland may not actually come on Shadowhunters for another couple of episodes still; this was just a big reveal for Freeform to announce at San Diego Comic-Con this year.

Interested in some other Shadowhunters season 2 scoop?

Odds are, you know where to go for that! The link here includes everything from the latest reviews, previews, and episode reviews! We’ll have even more on the show soon, so be sure to come back soon for some of that. (Photo: Freeform.)

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