WandaVision has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop talking about it. And it definitely doesn’t mean we have to stop talking about the real star of the show, Kathryn Hahn‘s Agnes, AKA Agatha Harkness. Agatha started the series as a friend to Wanda, but by the time the show wrapped up she was revealed to be a foe – but things almost worked out differently. According to WandaVision creator and showrunner Jac Schaeffer, early ideas for the series had Agatha acting as Wanda’s mentor.
Speaking with Entertainment Tonight, WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer revealed that it wasn’t originally going to be Agatha all along. According to Schaeffer, several different characters were discussed in regard to WandaVision (although she doesn’t specify who those characters are), and eventually, everyone came around to Agatha Harkness. The character comes right out of Marvel comics, but the comics version of Agatha is much different than the version played so memorably by Kathryn Hahn. And according to Schaeffer, in the early planning stages, Agatha was more of a mentor figure to Wanda than an adversary.
“In the early stages, she functioned as more of a mentor, and then as we got into the room and started really legitimately breaking the episodes, it became clear that having more of a proper antagonist would serve the structure really well, so she increasingly moved in that direction,” Schaeffer said. “But we didn’t lose sight of the potential for her to be a mentor and a teacher and a partner and a confidant. All of that still infused all of their scenes together. And we like to say that there’s a version of the story where Wanda and Agatha walk off into the sunset together, you know? You could kind of see it, and I think that led to better writing for the two of them, those gray tones in there.”
I don’t know about you, but I really wish they had gone with the “Wanda and Agatha walk off into the sunset together” ending. That’s the show I want to see. Schaeffer acknowledges that other people probably wanted to see that, too. “Well, and they’re both good and bad,” the WandaVision creator says. “They’re both light and dark. It’s all a spectrum. I don’t know. I feel like it all comes down to intention. All the things that Agatha says, she’s speaking truth. She’s telling Wanda what she needs to hear, but Agatha’s agenda is ultimately pretty selfish.”
The “Agatha as a mentor” idea is actually part of the comic character’s history, as the Marvel Wiki helpfully explains: “[Agatha] went on to aid other mystics in a number of crisis situations, and trained Wanda further in the use of her powers, claiming that her mutant ability was actually to use ‘chaos magic’ and helped fully resurrect the Avenger Wonder Man.”
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