According to its cast and creator, while Agatha All Along will allegedly do its best to honor its source material, the upcoming Disney Plus series also took care to ‘infuse’ its takes on Marvel Comics’ original characters and storylines with a heavy dose of female empowerment.
This look into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s soon-to-be-latest entry was provided by series creator Jac Schaeffer, lead Kathryn Hahn, and star Aubrey Plaza during a recent interview given to Total Film‘s Kim Taylor-Foster.
Beginning with a general overview of the series’ concept, Schaeffer told her host, “The show is our examination of what it means to be a witch.”
“It is about survival,” added the WandaVision head writer and Black Widow co-writer. “It is about community. And even though we were having fabulous costumes and crazy practical effects and all the witchiness that you can shake a stick at, we were always very mindful of the emotional and thematic truth of what we were doing.”
As for her approach to introducing the MCU versions of such Marvel Comics characters as Patti LuPone’s Lilia Calderu and Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale, both of whom have undergone significant changes in their translation from the page to the screen – namely rapid aging and a race-swapping, respectively – Schaeffer recalled, “My process has always been to use the comics as a jumping-off point. I get a tiny little bit and usually will go in a different direction. I work with a team of such talented writers and there are just so many ideas.”
“The characters we see that are based on the comics are our jumping-off points for where we take the characters,” she noted.
Offering her read of Agatha All Along‘s direction, Plaza, who appears in the series as the original character Rio Vidal, a.k.a. the Green Witch, asserted, “I’m not the biggest, most knowledgeable fan of the MCU, and I do know that the mythology and characters are taken very seriously, but there was something kind of extra about Agatha All Along where it felt like, yes, we are dealing with a character that exists in the MCU, and we’re honoring these characters and these storylines that have been written already in the comics…but there was something more being infused into the show, which is this idea of a woman getting her power back, and a coven of women that come together to empower each other in a lot of different ways.”
Moving to the general concept of ‘witches’ itself, the actor then opined, “I believe that all women have this deep-down intuition and power.”
“Women create life,” she continued. “Women have other skills and powers that men don’t have. I feel very strongly that the gathering of women is a very powerful thing, and historically speaking, men have been trying to isolate women and not let them gather for all of time because, in my opinion, it’s scary and powerful when women get together. I went to an all-girls school. I grew up understanding the power of women on a really deep level, and witches, to me, are just symbolic in that way. There’s something, also, about a woman who is so connected to nature and this kind of Mother Earth goddess energy that makes a lot more sense to me than living in the world and feeling that there’s some kind of man with a beard in the sky running things.”
As for Hahn, when pressed for her take on the same subject, the WandaVision star asserted, “A witch is able to live outside of the mainstream idea of what we think of as a woman.”
“She’s able to be scary and funny, she’s able to be all those emotions that we’re supposed to not reveal,” added the actor. “She can have big feelings. She can be mean, she can be funny, she can be all the things that are not socially okay. She has a lot of freedom and I think that in between the good and bad or the wrong or right is a really exciting place to be.”
Asked for further details as to whether Agatha All Along‘s cast of witches would be portrayed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the larger context of the MCU, Hahn explained, “A witch in this capacity… contains all the feelings, all the intentions, all the mess of being a human being.”
“It’s like your inside voice is on the outside,” So I think that contains all your good impulses and all your nasty, big, bad, gross impulses. In terms of villain or hero and blurring the lines, I think that a witch, especially Agatha, would really teeter on that edge completely. She really is selfish, and also has unexpected feelings.”
All three viewers interested in catching Agatha All Along can do so when it’s finally summoned onto Disney Plus tomorrow, September 18th.