Kathryn Hahn wouldn’t be the first name that comes to mind when you think of someone to play a major villain in a big budget Marvel Cinematic Universe project, even if she did voice Olivia Octavius in Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but it would be fair to say she knocked her role as Agatha Harkness out of the park in Disney Plus’ WandaVision.
Not only did the actress generate some big laughs with her impeccable comic timing, but when the reveal was made that it was in fact Agatha all along, she even got a catchy as hell theme song of her own. While the finale rushed through several of its major plot points and she was defeated rather handily by Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch at the end of the day, the door is still wide open for Westview’s other powerful witch to return in the future.
In a new interview, though, WandaVision lead writer Jac Schaeffer admitted that the original plan was actually to have Hahn’s Agatha hew much closer to her comic book counterpart and act as more of a straightforward mentor figure to Wanda, before the decision was made during the writing process to establish her as the villain instead.
“In the original conception, Agatha’s character was more in the mentor and magic-expert space. One of the things that never changed was that in the finale, Wanda would have to say goodbye to Vision. In my original notion of it, that goodbye was like a final binding spell that she had to do. And it was tied to a spell that Agatha had taught her early in the series, where a gravy tureen had shattered, and Agatha taught her this very basic binding spell.
In the end, what she has to do is integrate her trauma, and she has to bind Vision back to herself with that spell. Agatha ended up becoming more of an antagonistic force, because we needed that in the series. There was more dissection of the idea of chaos magic in the writers room, too. When we hired Matt Shakman, there was a long period where we were trying to design a chaos dimension, which ended up not serving us and wasn’t necessary.”
It was a smart decision that worked out well from both a narrative and performative perspective, and with Scarlet Witch now regarded as the MCU’s most powerful superhero, there are plenty of storytelling opportunities to bring Agatha back into the fold given her knowledge of chaos magic and familiarity with Wanda’s skill set. After all, the franchise knows a popular character when it sees one, so it’s safe to assume that WandaVision‘s big bad will return to our screens again one day.
