The Dungeons & Dragons movie gave life to an undead villain with secret backstories and dark powers

polygon.com:

Behind every great party of adventurers, there’s a villain who wants them dead — and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is no different. The titular thieves are pitted against the machinations of a cunning Red Wizard of Thay, who schemes to… well, that would be a spoiler.

But we can tell you that Shadow and Bone’s Daisy Head plays the necromancer Sofina with the uncanny grace befitting an undead sorceress — and that courtesy of Ten Speed Press, we can present an excerpt from The Art & Making of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, full of concept art of Sofina, the Red Wizards, their terrifying emperor Szass Tam, and insight from actors and creatives behind the scenes.

[Ed note: This excerpt contains spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.]

A mysterious human, Sofina hides her true identity as a Red Wizard. “Red Wizards are the ruling class of Thay, and their leader, their ruler, is Szass Tam,” says actor Daisy Head. “They are ultimately feared as some of the most powerful and nefarious wizards in all of Faerûn.”

Szass Tam is a powerful necromancer. When he took over Thay, he turned its citizens into an undead legion loyal to him and his fellow necromancers. These undead cannot be killed by conventional means, which makes this danger brewing in Thay particularly scary. “It’s a tricky concept to play someone who is essentially undead because it was interesting to try to understand if and how they emote,” Head explains. “There’s more dimension if it is rooted in something real and something emotional. So, I essentially didn’t want her just to be bad for the sake of being bad. So, I developed my own very dark… backstory from when she was a child, and essentially, she felt she had nothing left to