2024-09-18 19:35:05
Who was the breakout star of WandaVision? It was Agatha all along.
Premiering Wednesday, September 18, with two episodes on Disney+, Marvel Television’s Agatha All Along finds Emmy® Award nominee Kathryn Hahn reprising her role as Westview’s resident witch (albeit a powerless one). A mysterious goth Teen, played by Joe Locke, helps break Agatha free from a distorted spell and begs her to take him on The Witches’ Road—a magical gauntlet of trials that, if survived, will reward them with what they most desire. Before they can go down, down, down The Witches’ Road, they’ll first need to convene a coven—which is easier said than done for a longtime loner like Agatha.
Agatha All Along hails from Jac Schaeffer, who served as the head writer on Marvel Television’s WandaVision. “I had probably an unhealthy fixation on Agatha following WandaVision,” Schaeffer admits. “That was such a fulfilling creative experience for me; it’s a wholesome story, but it’s also an angsty story. Wanda was very torn. There was a lot of trauma with Wanda, whereas Agatha is so unabashedly witchy! She’s so proud of being a witch. She’s obviously hiding so much in her past, and that creates a fabulous segue from WandaVision.”
As showrunner and executive producer of Agatha All Along, Schaeffer wanted to incorporate some of the elements that made WandaVision so critically and commercially successful. “A lot of the ways in which WandaVision was exciting, we have endeavored to recapture some similar magic,” she says. “Agatha All Along is a puzzle-box show. There are lots of mysteries, lots of reveals, lots of unexpected moments. We wanted to dip back into that pastiche of the genre play but do it in a totally different way. We’re leaving the sitcoms behind, but there are a lot of films and television shows that we allude to inside of the show. It was really a fun for us to create, and I hope it will be fun for audiences to watch.”
“There’s a bit of an expectation that a WandaVision spinoff should have a lot of the same pedigree, which it does—but this is Agatha Harkness. She is a wildly different protagonist than Wanda,” she continues. “This show is darker. We lean very hard into the horror. I think that by itself is unusual for the MCU. The ‘witchiness’ is something we haven’t really seen.”
Likewise, Hahn says she was eager to explore a darker, more mystical side of Agatha—particularly given that her character masqueraded as a nosy neighbor named Agnes for much of WandaVision. “The character I had played in WandaVision was its own specific bird, and it became really important to all of us that she didn’t lose that,” she says. “That is who she is, with her nasty magic, her masochism, her performative quality, her assertiveness, her being so sarcastic and mean. You’re not ever sure of her intentions; they keep switching. We really wanted to keep that. But this show gave us an opportunity to dig into a side character and see what lies beneath all that. There’s so little about witches—and the origin of witches—in the MCU, so I was very excited to dig into that whole world.”
Stronger Together
At its core, Agatha All Along “is a story of a coven-less witch who is forced to form a coven,” Schaeffer explains. Joining Agatha and Teen on The Witches’ Road are potions witch Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), protection witch Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn), divination witch Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), the Green Witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), and… non-witch Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp). “A lot of what the story is about is the power of community, the power of tribe. All of these characters are loners to various degrees, and they are people who are disconnected from their own internal sources of power,” Schaeffer continues. “Through the circle of togetherness and through harmonizing—both literally and figuratively—they are able to reconnect with their naturally existing internal power.”
It’s no secret that Agatha—who was cast out of her own coven in 1693 for practicing forbidden magic—does not play well with others. “At the beginning she’s kind of a twisted ringleader,” Hahn says. “If this was a circus, she would definitely be the Barnum or Bailey. She’s got the smarts—maybe an almost Tin Man quality, if Tin Man had major character energy. And I think that she has to be the most confident one who gets all these little scared witches running behind her. She has to show a lot of bravado and kind of fake it ’til she feels it. Remember, she still has no powers, so she has to manifest power through her actions and her words. She’s leaning a lot on appearing powerful to these other witches.”
But in fairness to Agatha, the others aren’t exactly team players, either.
“In the coven, there’s a lot of sniping at each other,” Schaeffer says. “But underneath it all, there is a really strong thread of respect, which I think is really satisfying to see teased out.”
If Agatha wants to reach the end of The Witches’ Road, she’ll have to work with the others and get out of her own way. “She’s her biggest obstacle,” Schaeffer says. “She’s always after the shortcut, the instant gratification. She’s always looking out for No. 1. She is impatient and self-serving, and cutting corners just gets her into trouble—especially on this journey.”
Practical Magic
Like WandaVision, Agatha All Along relies heavily on practical effects.
Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, “was really excited about the practical side of this project,” Schaeffer says. “On a larger corporate studio level, to get the okay to do practical effects for this project felt very special and very unique. On a creative level, a lot of the inspiration and the touchstones for this show are older properties that were trailblazers in the world of practical effects—classic movies like The Wizard of Oz, The NeverEnding Story, The Goonies, The Dark Crystal, The Princess Bride. We wanted Agatha All Along to have that texture. Our version of witchcraft is very connected to the earth, so we wanted it to feel like it was something you could touch, that felt real rather than CG or ephemeral.”
Schaeffer discovered the magic of practical effects during her first MCU series. “On WandaVision, we did a lot of practical effects in the early episodes that were inspired by Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show. We filmed the pilot episode in front of a studio audience, and that’s where I learned what those kinds of choices can do for an actor’s performance,” she says. “On Agatha All Along, our cast got to walk on the actual Witches’ Road. I can’t even quantify what that did for them and their performances.”
Hahn, for one, can’t wait for these witches to cast a spell on audiences.
“Oh, I am so ready for them to laugh, for them to be surprised, for them to have some actual jump scares, for them to fall in love with all these witches, and for them to realize that in order to get one’s power back, you can’t do it alone,” she says. “That was, I think, the hardest lesson for this witch. It took a long time.”
“I’m so proud to be a part of this,” she adds. “I could not be happier with how it turned out.”
