In person, Jason Ralph—a Broadway veteran with credits on Gossip Girl and Madam Secretary—seems too likable, smiley, and comfortable in his skin to play Quentin Coldwater, the often-depressed, introspective lead of The Magicians, the Syfy series based on Lev Grossman’s best-selling trilogy that returned Wednesday for its second season.

But that’s missing the point, as Grossman himself explains. “The key things about Quentin,” he said recently over drinks at a Brooklyn wine bar, “are that he has to project a lot of intelligence—he is intellectually very quick and very sharp. And yet at the same time, he’s capable of being emotionally pretty slow. So you have to bring to the table a certain touch of darkness, a certain shadow. . . and it has to feel authentic. And Jason brings all those things.”

Ralph says that, instinctively, he does feel close to Quentin’s character. “I did identify with Quentin a lot,” he says, “in the way he draws on the energy of the people around him—he’s so sensitive to it and responsive to it, and he uses it to change the way he behaves. It’s part of how I feel as an actor. I’m not exactly the same as him mentally, but I get him.”

He gets the character so well, in part, because of how closely he read Grossman’s trilogy. “I began the audition process before I’d read the books, but right away there was something about this guy that I was drawn to,” Ralph says . Once he picked up the first book, which begins with the sentences “Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed,” he was “hooked almost immediately and felt ownership and responsibility for this story and this character.” Ralph now considers himself the on-set “guardian” of the books. “There are so many points during filming where probably nobody else notices what I’m doing, but I’m looking in a particular direction or saying something in a particular way because that’s what Quentin’s doing in that scene in the books.”

From left to right: Hale Appleman as “Eliot,” Olivia Taylor Dudley as “Alice,” and Jason Ralph as “Quentin” in The Magicians. Courtesy of Syfy.

More on those books: The Magicians trilogy contains a magic school, and evil to be fought, inviting comparisons to Harry Potter. But the show aptly demonstrates how short the comparison falls. The Magicians is like Harry Potter if Harry Potter had explored sex, drugs, and existential frustration, and if it had featured a staggering array of intellectual and cultural references—including nods to many other classic fantasy series, which The Magicians incorporates and builds upon. The series constructs a unique magic world, in that it’s not really different from our own. “It takes place in a world of randomness, chaos,” Grossman says. “Basically, it takes place in something pretty close to reality.”