Cintaine Schutte talks about her role as Maggie on Wyfie and how unexpected love can be in a Q&A session.
CINTAINE SCHUTTE PLAYS MAGGIE ON ‘WYFIE’
Actress Cintaine Schutte joined the cast for season two of Wyfie as Maggie, Shay’s older crush. She steals the show in this week’s episodes, as Maggie and Shay (Green) host their first meal as a couple, and then Maggie accidentally wakes up in Die Grot and gets a taste of student life when she starts day drinking with Amanda (Celeste Loots from Trompoppie and One Piece).
Take a look at the trailer…
Q&A: CINTAINE SCHUTTE ON ‘WYFIE’ CHARACTER
How did you become part of Wyfie?
I did an audition on a Friday; on the Monday I went for a chemistry test with Beáta; and two days later I started shooting! I was quite surprised when everything happened so quickly.
I am very happy that the role came my way. I had already watched a bit of Wyfie, and it looked like a great project, but I also wanted to challenge myself.
At the time, Marcel Spaumer [head writer] and his team already had an idea of Maggie’s storyline, but not too far into the future. That was also a new experience, because, usually, when you star in a series, you get all the episodes’ scripts before you start shooting, but here I had to surrender myself completely to a new process, because they wrote as they filmed, block by block.
At first, I thought my character would only have a small story arc, just be in and out of the series, but then it was so cool that they decided to make Maggie’s role bigger.
Tell us more about Maggie.
Maggie is a professor. She’s head of the Political Science department at Eike. She is friends with Ragel [Therese Bam], who works in the same department. She meets Shay quite by chance and, as the story goes on, they frequently run into each other and start to connect, with Maggie not knowing that Ragel is actually Shay’s mother. This is where things get intriguing because you also catch Shay in the middle of her storyline where her relationship with her mother is not great, and then on top of that she starts this relationship with one of Ragel’s colleagues, and someone older than she is.
Are there similarities between you and Maggie?
I’m not like Maggie at all but I think Shay evokes a softness in Maggie and that is something that I have as Cintaine, a softness. It’s my golden rule in life to do everything from a relaxed place, because then you can manage anything. And that’s what Shay brings out in Maggie. She tears down all those walls, so Maggie can just be.
How did you decide to approach how you played the role?
Maggie is almost 20 years older than Shay but I decided that I didn’t want it to be about an intergenerational relationship or a gay relationship. I wanted it to revolve around her falling in love with Shay, and how unexpected it is.
Maggie has just returned to South Africa after being in Germany for 12 years, where she was in a relationship with a man, Ruan. It didn’t work out and she came back to South Africa. Maggie promised herself that she was going to start a new chapter, grow new roots, be focused, build a life and maybe be single for a while. But, as life goes, Shay captivates her, and now they must navigate the challenges and criticisms of society together. She’s an intelligent woman: she knows what people will think. But this time she’s a bit selfish, in the sense that she no longer cares about what other people think or expect of her.
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