Which Wizards of Waverly Place Character Are You?

Learn More About Wizards of Waverly Place

Wizards of Waverly Place ran on Disney Channel from October 2007 to January 2012, and in a decade stacked with sitcoms about secretly famous teenagers it managed to be the strangest and the funniest of the lot. The hook was not fame — it was inheritance. The three Russo siblings are all wizards, but only one of them gets to keep their powers as an adult. That competition hangs over all four seasons, and it is the reason the show has more bite than its pastel branding suggests.

The Russos live above a sandwich shop in Greenwich Village. Jerry, the father, was a wizard himself and gave up his powers for their non-magical mother Theresa. He now teaches his kids magic in a converted freezer in the back of the restaurant, which is roughly the energy level the entire series operates at. It is a family sitcom that happens to have portals in it, rather than a fantasy show with a family attached.

Selena Gomez’s Alex Russo is the reason it worked. Disney Channel protagonists of the era were usually well-meaning kids who learned a lesson by the credits. Alex is lazy, manipulative, frequently the villain of her own episode, and unrepentantly funny about it. The writers let her lose, let her be selfish, and let the consequences stick. That she still ends up the most beloved character in the catalogue says a lot about how starved that audience was for a lead who was allowed to be difficult.

David Henrie’s Justin plays the straight man without ever being a scold — his rigidity is played as its own kind of ridiculous. Jake T. Austin’s Max is pure surrealist comic relief. Jennifer Stone’s Harper, Alex’s best friend, escalated over the run from a background character into one of the show’s most reliable sources of joke-per-minute density, particularly once she moved in with the family and learned the family secret.

The show cleaned up commercially and critically. It won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Program twice, in 2009 and 2012, and Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie drew over eleven million viewers on its 2009 premiere, one of the highest-rated cable telecasts of the year. Its final episode, which finally settled the family wizard competition, was one of Disney Channel’s biggest series finales ever.

It also functioned as a launchpad. Gomez went from Alex Russo to a music career, to Only Murders in the Building, to running a cosmetics company. Plenty of Disney Channel stars have made that jump; very few have done it while staying fond enough of the original show to come back to it.

Which is exactly what happened. Wizards Beyond Waverly Place premiered in October 2024 with David Henrie returning as a grown-up Justin, now living a deliberately non-magical suburban life until a young wizard named Billie turns up needing training. Gomez appears as Alex, and the sequel series was renewed for further seasons after strong numbers — a rare case of a Disney Channel revival landing with both the original audience and a new one.

If this is your nostalgia lane, try our iCarly character quiz or the Victorious quiz, and for the wider Disney catalogue there is always What Disney Character Are You?