Warning: Spoilers to follow.
Julian Hilliard played the young Billy Maximoff in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Now, as the actor enters his teenage years, many Marvel fans are asking the million-dollar question about the MCU hero.
In WandaVision, Hilliard and Jett Klyne play Billy and Tommy respectively – the sons of Wanda Maximoff and Vision on the show. Considering the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, not many fans gave them a chance of ever returning to the MCU. The multiverse, though, operates under its own set of rules and principles, so never say never to resurrections or variants. In fact, the only thing truly dead in this universe is Eternals 2 ever happening. What is alive, though, is the possibility of spoilers, so if you haven’t caught up with Agatha All Along yet, bookmark this page, and come back at a later stage.
The expectation around Agatha All Along was always that it would tie back into WandaVision in some way, especially considering the role Agatha Harkness played in pulling the strings in Westview. However, an unexpected and major twist occurred when Joe Locke’s Teen was revealed to be Billy Kaplan whose body had been inhabited by the wandering soul of Billy Maximoff – Wanda’s son!
This raised a few questions among the fanbase where some have asked why the MCU continues to do its child actors dirty and recast them.
One user on X wrote: “It is very weird that they hire these kids for these roles, and then recast them as soon as they’re old enough to play the teen versions of their characters.” Rightfully so, some of the commentators have pointed out that the twist wouldn’t have worked with Hilliard in the role because Billy Kaplan is meant to be a new body while others urged the original poster to read more comic books to find out about the link between Wanda and Billy Kaplan.
There is a valid debate surrounding the question if Marvel Studios continues to do wrong by its younger actors by aging them up too fast or switching them out for new actors. Look at Cassie Lang as a prime example. Abby Ryder Fortson played the character in Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp; however, when Avengers: Endgame came around, Fortson was replaced by Emma Fuhrmann. The storyline explanation for the different actors makes sense since Scott Lang had been stuck in the Quantum Realm for many years, so Cassie would be much older and a teenager by that time. Fortson was still far too young to play a teen.
That said, it doesn’t explain why Fuhrmann was replaced by Kathryn Newton for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. According to Fuhrmann’s post on X, she found out the news via the media much like everyone else, writing: “I was as sad as you all were to hear the news.”
While it’s sad to read how actors often get the bad news at the same time as the rest of us, it doesn’t appear to be restricted to only the young ones. After all, famous MCU recasts include swapping out Terrence Howard for Don Cheadle as James Rhodes, Edward Norton making way for Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, and Josh Brolin replacing Damion Poitier as Thanos. Simply put, it wouldn’t have made storyline sense for WandaVision‘s Billy actor to play Billy Kaplan in Agatha All Along.