Editor's note: This post contains major spoilers for Marvel Studios and Disney+'sAgatha All Along.
Now that we’ve taken the long journey down the witches' road of Agatha All Along, it’s time to spill the tea (or rather, the witch’s brew!) on some major ways that creator/showrunner/director/executive producer Jac Schaeffer, helped craft one of the queerest projects the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever seen!
First and foremost, we FINALLY got the payoff of Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and Rio (a.k.a. Lady Death, played by Aubrey Plaza) and their romantic magnetism in the final two episodes (eight and nine) of the popular miniseries. The Marvel character of Lady Death has many admirers and entanglements over the years, including big bad Thanos himself and the merc with a mouth Deadpool. But when it came to adding Agatha to that list, Schaeffer told Out:
“We were sort of designing characters for Agatha to sort of bounce around with and so we had like antagonist ideas and we had ex-lover ideas. And at a point it kind of dovetailed because we're talking about Agatha Harkness here. Anyone that she has a romantic past with, she's also going to have antagonistic relationships with. I can't remember when Lady Death really popped, but we all jumped on it in the room and we had to get approval for it. From Kevin (Feige) and from you know, larger Marvel. And we were like, fingers crossed. And then we got the go-ahead."
“We were thrilled because it just felt so right for Agatha," she continued. "It just felt like the biggest flex. And with the show, we were trying to build Agatha out. The baller move of 'Who's your ex-girlfriend? Death. You've heard of Death? Have you heard of Lady Death?'”
As for queerness and witchiness being intertwined (like Rio and Agatha’s lips), Schaeffer notes:
“In our very serious research into the history of witches and witchcraft, immediately there were articles and think pieces and all kinds of content about the intersection of queer culture and witches. My writers did a lot of the research and they were giving me ideas and a framework. And from what I was looking at, the distillation for me is that witches have always been othered. They've always been persecuted. And they are community based. They are tribal and it is found family. There is a focus on ritual performance, physical representation. The intersection is kind of even too big to touch on in a ten minute interview, but for us, it made it vital to include robust queer representation in the show.”
Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios
When it came to other Marvel queer couples, we would’ve been remiss not to ask about Wiccan’s (Joe Locke) partner Hulkling and if perhaps Schaeffer’s dream casting included someone with dangerously toned arms (as Joe Locke describes his character’s onscreen boyfriend’s limbs). Alas she was unable to speak further to it, but we can dream!
When it came to the emotional core of the series and getting it right, they didn’t have a particularly hard creative road to travel.
“Early conversations, it was about a redemption arc for Agatha Harkness, which immediately we all kind of rejected that as a notion. The idea of sort of neutering this character, of making her toothless... she is so thorny and so complicated, but she also isn't. She's not evil in her bones. She's not out to cause destruction. So I think everyone involved had kind of an internal Agatha moral compass of when it's too far and when it's not far enough. But I think the trickiest part was having the fortitude to stick with that, to not Disney-fy her.”
And from the original vision to what viewers got on screen, it was all a refining process.
“Our early outlines, they were a lot more chaotic. I think that's the nature of this kind of work. This show is extremely ambitious in terms of the narrative scope of it, what we're trying, what we were trying to do with character arcs, giving everybody an authentic, fully-realized character arc, creating bespoke witchy escape rooms for each episode, and also having a larger arc for the season. You know, introducing multiple new characters into the MCU, defining witchcraft in the MCU..."
Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios
Finally when it came to musical spiritual connections (as we learned in the finale, the origins of the music are beyond integral to Agatha’s story), Schaeffer couldn’t have found better partners than the songwriting duo of Lopez & Anderson-Lopez.
When posed the question about the genre of music that contained the most magic, her answer was exactly in line with theirs:
“I'm not enough of a student of music, but, I mean, I would say anything where there's harmonizing like vocal harmonizing is.”
If Agatha All Along is anything to go by, then we cannot wait to see what other stories Schaeffer has for us (and hopefully the MCU!) in the future!
Agatha All Along is streaming on Disney+.
