“My character this year, a lot of what happens to her is a result of the time she spent between Season 4 and Season 5,” McGrath told Entertainment Weekly during Comic-Con in San Diego last month. “It’s a three-year time-jump, so the really nice thing for us as actors with this season is that we’re all older.

“From the start of Season 1 to now we’re in Season 5, it’s a huge age jump. We were playing very early twenties at the start, now I feel like we’ve all started to play adults, which for us I think is a really great change.”

“It was always going to be a growing-up tale for all of us,” added Morgan. “There’s not a lot of guest stars – we do have some brilliant guest stars, I mean we’ve got Liam Cunningham coming in at the beginning, we’ve got some brilliant people coming in – but the stories are more focused, now, on the legends that we’re going to become.”

What are you most looking forward to about seeing older versions of the Merlin cast? Let us know below…

> Buy the Complete Series 4 boxset on Amazon.

Watch the Series 5 trailer…