Why doesn’t Elizabeth Olsen appear in Agatha All Along?
Wanda Maximoff is the starting point of the whole story. We see her body, but never her face, and that’s on purpose.
Without her, noAgatha All Along.. The new Disney Plus series is directly derived from WandaVision and what happens to Agatha Harkness, at the beginning of the story, comes from the spell that Wanda Maximoff cast on her three years ago. Since then, the witch of Salem dreams her life. But when Wanda dies (at the end of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness), the charm fades. While she takes herself for an investigator at the Mare of Easttown, Kathryn Hahn finds himself facing the corpse of a woman. Wanda’s corpse, we then understand. She is wearing the same sweatshirt, has fingers charred by the use of magic and under her nails, we find earth from Eastern Europe, where Mount Wundagore is located, the site of Wanda’s last fight in the MCU film (2022). Finally, the label affixed to the body does indeed bear the name “Wanda Maximoff”.
Yet, Agatha All Along never shows Wanda’s face. She conspicuously avoids putting Elizabeth Olsen on screen. Because she couldn’t come back? Or because she didn’t want to?
The star is known to not be on very good terms with Marvel, multiplying public criticism of the use of his character in the MCU, especially since WandaVision…Her absence in the sequel is thus spectacularly conspicuous and when TVLine simply asks the creator about it, Jac Schaeffershe seems destabilized (see the video below).
“You know, that’s a question I don’t know how to answer…” she stammers, before explaining:
“It was never intended to show her face, both stylistically and because this show is not her story. When the body is found and then returned to the woods, we intentionally put the camera on Agatha’s face. That’s really where our attention is, we show that that’s where the show is focused.”
By leaving doubt hanging. Because Agatha could well have dreamed this corpse. Showing Wanda’s body lying there will have something very definitive, whereas she was “simply” left buried under rocks at the end of Doctor Strange 2. Elizabeth Olsen still has hope of returning to Marvel one day. Agatha All Along couldn’t be the series that drew a line under that possibility.