The long-awaited Shazam sequel is finally here!

Shazam: Fury Of The Gods follows Billy Batson as well as a group of like-minded foster kids with similar powers who must learn how to juggle teenage life with having adult Super Hero alter-egos. Their lives are soon upended when the Daughters of Atlas, a vengeful trio of ancient gods, arrive on Earth in search of the magic stolen from them long ago, thrusting Billy and his family into a battle that could determine the fate of their world.

Shadow and Act spoke with stars Rachel Zegler, Lucy Liu, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Zachary Levi, as well as director David F. Sandberg, about the film, the growth in the characters and the dynamic of the new villains.

“It feels like that large chunk of time, like even for me–it felt like I went through this whole, ‘I’m a teenager and self-discovery and, you know, figuring out myself,’ and [I] kind of went on that journey with Billy….that road to self-discovery,” said Angel. “And so coming back onto set, I felt like I went on that journey and it made it more believable for me, performance-wise, to jump into.”

Grazer had similar sentiments, saying, “I think it’s pretty great that we pick up in a place where it felt really good naturally to just pick up where we left off after wrapping on the first one [and] not seeing each other for maybe a year or so. [It] feels like we kind of went through that journey. We went through that journey and then picked up like nothing had happened in between–but we did age and we looked older and puberty is a mess [laughs].”

The film’s villains, Daughters of Atlas, played by Zegler, Liu and Helen Mirren, are a threatening group of women who have revenge on the mind.

“I feel like there’s a blooming dynamic in superhero films, particularly with the ‘bad guys,’ where the line is a bit more blurred,” Zegler told us. “I noticed it I think for the first time when I was watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the Sam Raimi film which I loved. There’s a scene where Elizabeth Olsen’s character says, ‘This is me being reasonable.’ And she believes that she’s right. When I was watching it, I was talking to my boyfriend, and I was like, ‘That’s what it felt like on Shazam, where it was like these three women are [like] this is them being reasonable.’ I feel like Helen [Mirren] especially has that moment where she says, ‘This is war. We’re here to avenge our father, we want to bring our world back to life, and we will go to extreme lengths.'”

Liu added, “We come here to save our world and something has been taken from us– and we need that. We need to plant that back into our world. And I think when you’re desperate, you’re not necessarily thinking about the destruction of another world. You don’t really care. You’re about bringing your world back to life. And I think that is our intention coming in and we follow through and some of us don’t follow through as much as others [laughs].”

Shazam: Fury of the Gods also stars Adam Brody, Ross Butler, Meagan Good, D.J. Cotrona, Grace Caroline Currey, Faithe Herman, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand, Marta Milans, Cooper Andrews and Djimon Hounsou.

Watch the full interview below: