Michael Narducci talks about the new Rebekah on The Originals

SPOILER WARNING: If you have not yet watched tonight’s episode of The Originals, read no further!

Originals fans, it’s time for a new Rebekah.

Just as we were getting excited and used to having Claire Holt back – the character is now in a new body, where she will be played Maisie Richardson-Sellers, an actress whose upcoming credits include Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We spoke with The Originals Executive Producer Michael Narducci about this big twist last week on the phone.

“We love Rebekah as a character. She’s an essential part of this family,” Narducci explained. “She’s such a spitfire; she’s so strong-willed. She has a definite attitude, and for a thousand years, she’s been able to stand up to both Klaus and Elijah. She wanted freedom, so she left last season, and she knew that the family needed her, so she came back long enough to take the child, Hope, and to go away with her, and now she has returned and she’s going to be a part of the family’s dealing with the threat posed by Esther. But Esther’s threat is that she wants to wipe the slate clean by putting her children in other bodies.”

“We knew that for that threat to have any kind of true teeth, it would mean that she would have to be in some way successful,” Narducci continued. “We thought very early on that it would be most interesting for Rebekah to be put into a new body, because Rebekah, we know from Vampire Diaries Season 4, had wanted to be human, and mortal, and to experience life as a human, and to potentially have children, and to be free of the curse of vampirism. And this is kind of a cautionary tale of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ She goes into this situation through a very bizarre chain of events, and some twists and turns and betrayals, and winds up not only in another body, but trapped in a situation where having vampire strength and vampire speed would have been perfect, and would have allowed her to easily escape, but now, she is going to have to rely on all of those character traits that I believe sum up her character so well. So, it’s a very interesting way to explore the character of Rebekah, who she is, what she will fight for, what she believes in, not only with regard to her family, but with what she wants out of life,” he said.

Does this mean this is the end of Claire Holt on The Originals? Definitely not. “I will say two things: One, we certainly are not destroying Rebekah’s original body. Claire Holt will be lying unconscious in a coffin on our show until the story resolves itself. And then the other truth is that in the same way that we’ve seen Nathaniel Buzolic in flashbacks while continuing to show Kol portrayed by Daniel Sharman in the present, there’s a world where we continue to do flashbacks of what the Mikaelson family dealt with for their 1000 years of history, and those would essentially require the use of Claire Holt,” Narducci said. “So, we’re hoping to use her as much as possible, but we have a really great storyline for the character of Rebekah that I’m extremely excited about,” he teased.

The Originals returns with new episodes January 19 on The CW.