Don’t worry, Wizards of Waverly Place fans, Jennifer Stone is not retired from acting. The actress set the record straight after her brief appearance on Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
Stone, who played Harper Finkle on the beloved Disney Channel series, returned for Season 3 of Wizards Beyond as the same character. She returned alongside Gregg Sulkin, who played Mason Greyback, Alex Russo (Selena Gomez)’s werewolf ex-boyfriend. Finkle was Russo’s best friend.
After Wizards of Waverly Place, Stone appeared in a few smaller roles, but hadn’t acted in anything since 2019, until now. However, the actress shared that she never intended to get away from acting.
Stone graduated from nursing school in December 2019. Then, a few months later, the world shut down due to Covid-19. She worked in hospitals throughout the pandemic and put acting on the back burner, but she did not retire, despite only returning to her first role seven years later.
“The cosmic comedy of it all is that returning to acting was always the plan,” she told TV Insider. “I laugh at the timing of it because I graduated nursing school in December 2019. My first thought was, ‘Ok cool. Now I can get back to acting,’ and then the world fell apart, so the whole business changed. That was always the plan. I would go to nursing school and then split my time between nursing and acting.”
“Life just changed. I worked through the pandemic, and then I had to do some work on myself because that was pretty heavy to go through,” she continued. “The past couple of years, I finally felt like I am back to myself again, and I actually could get back to what I love, my first passion of acting, 110 percent.”
“It always makes me laugh when people are like, ‘She got a normal job. She quit acting.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no. We can be two things. We can be like Harper, where she writes and designs.’”
Stone also isn’t ruling out returning to the world of Wizards in the future. After this appearance, she’d love to explore any spinoff the show has to offer. “That would be so much fun. I don’t know how logistically that would work. There were rumors back in the day of a spinoff with Alex and Harper, doing that apartment side quest stuff, with talks of being a spinoff, so getting to actually come back to do that, and honor the spinoff that never was, is really cool,” she said.
“It was crazy how much we just slipped right back into it. It’s been so long since we’ve played those characters. I know Selena’s popped back into the reboot a few times, but for Gregg and me, it’s been over a decade since we’ve played those characters. We just popped right back in. It was really strange, but wonderfully so, how easy it was to get back into the groove of things and working with each other and working the comedic beats and everything. We had a blast. It was really, really fun,” Stone ended.
Wizard Beyond Waverly Place, Season 3, streaming, Disney+, August 5