In the opinion of series actor Sasheer Zamata, one of most praiseworthy aspects of Marvel’s Agatha All Along is how much “creative license” it takes with the original comic book source material.
Zamata, who in the Disney Plus series plays a race-swapped, costume-less, and non-Midnight Suns affiliated of Jennifer Kale, offered her thoughts on Agatha All Along‘s creative direction during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Brande Victorian.
Asked by Victorian if she had “already been a superhero fan” or watched WandaVision “before getting cast”, the actor asserted, “I did. I’m a big fan of Marvel everything, and I did watch WandaVision. When I found out they were doing a spinoff based on witches I remember telling my reps, ‘I do need to be seen for this, like this is the WandaVision people.'”
Turning to offer praise to the series’ production team, Zamata added. “The creator, Jac Schaeffer, is so smart and I really think she’s creating a whole different tone for Marvel; we’re able to do so many other things you haven’t seen before. I’m such a fan of all the action, and they’ve taken a lot of creative license with these characters. I’m excited for people to see the amount of emotion and depth we can really reach with these characters.”
Notably, Schaeffer and her crew’s decision to basically use the Marvel Comics source material as nothing more than a ‘costume’ for their own fan fiction comes as little surprise given the WandaVision and Agatha All Along showrunner’s own admitted distaste for the comics themselves.
Speaking to Esquire‘s Dom Nero in August 2019, Schaeffer declared that in regards to any Marvel character who came under her direction, she was “not interested in adhering to comic canon that is discriminatory in any way or that violates my values system.”
Likewise, asked in 2021 by Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro as to what role the Scarlet Witch’s original stories, particularly House of M, played in her development of WandaVision, Schaeffer recalled, “[Marvel Studios] sent me a bunch of the comics and I looked over them. I’m not a very good comic reader. I have a hard time digesting the storylines and I never know which cell to look at, and I don’t know, I’m a disappointment, perhaps, to the fandom in that way, but the imagery is always, of course, very startling and moving and inspiring, and it was Kevin Feige’s idea to marry Wanda and Vision to the sitcom world.”
“So, I had those pieces to begin with, and then it was also their desire to explore her grief and that whatever happened in this series, this sitcom situation, was some sort of manifestation of her grief and her desire to live in this fantasy world,” she added. “What I brought was a structure for that.”
To this end, the showrunner then admitted that more than just her inability to ‘understand the language of comics’, she avoided adhering to the source material because she found its contents to be outright boring.
“You know, having seen it in the comics, I thought that it would probably be fairly predictable if we told a linear story of, you know, Wanda is upset and she freaks out and she creates this false world and then it’s a sitcom,” she explained. “That didn’t seem interesting to me. It didn’t seem like an interesting watch. It felt a little kind of by the numbers and harder to dig into emotionally. So, I did pitch this idea that we start in this sitcom, and that we are with Wanda with not knowing what’s going on and that we plant red herrings and wonder if there’s some nefarious force that’s doing this to her, and that we’re with her in the discovery that it is her, you know?”
Agatha All Along is currently airing on Disney Plus, with new episodes being conjured onto the streaming platform every Wednesday.