Superheroes in sitcom avatar
WandaVision, Marvel’s first series for Disney+, stars Olsen and Bettany
In the time they have spent playing Marvel heroes together, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany have gotten extremely comfortable with each other. Not even a little mis directed mucus during the making of their new Disney+ series, WandaVision— an incident they affectionately describe as “Snotgate” — flustered them for long.
It occurred when their characters— a woman enhanced with psychic powers named Wanda Maximoff( Olsen) and a synthetic android called Vision ( Bettany) — shared a kiss in especially coldweather. And some disagreements remain about the specifics of howit transpired.
“Paulwas not in a good mood for me to make a joke about his snot,” Olsen said in a video interview with Bettany last month. “It was my first time ever seeing him get truly defensive about anything.”
Here, Bettany leant into his camera and replied, sotto voce: “Itwas snot. Anyway.”
They agreed that their differences were quickly settled, and nowthey can laugh about it. “Itwas over as quickly as it happened,” Bettany said.
Such are the perils of playing a troubled woman and a sophisticated robot who have fallen in love with each other — characters who first met in the 2015 Marvel block buster Avengers: Age of Ultron, returned for several sequels and now get the chance to carry their own television series when Wand a Vision makes its debut January 15.
Like its main characters, WandaVision is, well, weird. It’s not strictly an action- packed spectacle in the manner of hit movies like
Avengers: Endgame; it’s a hybrid of drama and comedy that pays homage to vintage sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched and Family Ties.
Now, through circumstances beyond anyone’s control, WandaVision has to carry even more weight. Whenthe pandemic prompted Marvel to reshuffle its release calendar, WandaVision
became the studio’s first attempt to bring the superhero soap opera of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to an original Disney+ series, in hopes that it will do for its comic- book characters what The Mandalorian has done for Star Wars, another Disney- owned franchise.
These are unexpectedly high stakes, but like the love- struck misfits they play, the stars of WandaVision see themas reasons to be more understanding of each other, snot and all.
As Olsen explained: “It’s daunting to take thesemovie- theatre characters and put them on a small screen. There’s a lot of firsts that are a little scary as an actor.”
Bettany agreed. “We need to feel safe with each other,” he added, “to do the thing we’re doing.”
Both actors entered the Marvel family in unusual ways. Bettany, a star of films like A Beautiful Mind and Margin Call, was cast in the first MCU movie, Iron Man, to play the voice of Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence system,
J. A. R. V. I. S .“I would turn up for one day’s work and solve everyone’s problems,” Bettany said. “I could go, ‘ The bad guys
are coming, sir!’ And then they would give mea bag of money, and Iwould go home. Itwas lovely.”
Bettany was upgraded to an on- screen role for Age of Ultron, which also introduced Olsen ( Martha Marcy May Marlene) as Wanda. At that time, Olsen said: “Iwas getting typecast as emotionally struggling young women in small genre films. Theywere like, ‘ Let’s put her in a bigger genre film andmake her the mentally unhealthy struggling hero.’”
But Vision was seemingly killed in Avengers: Infinity War, and the following year, Endgame concluded the narrative arcs of major heroes like Iron Man and Captain America.
Marvel was exploring storylines for its nextwave of movies when Disney introduced its Disney+ streaming service, with the expectation that Marvel would also provide original content for it.
Kevin Feige, the Marvel Studios president, said that a Disney+ series offered the opportunity to flesh out the relationship between Wanda and Vision that had been only hinted at in themovies.
With Wanda Vision, Feige said that he had wanted to honour the complex tended ity of the title characters and Wanda’s reality- warping abilities but also to leaven the story with tributes to sitcom history. “I feel like I’ve justified all the time I spent playing with action figures inmy backyard,” he said. “All the time I spent watching Nick at Nite and old TV shows, I haven’t justified yet. This showis helping medo that.”
The series finds Wanda and Vision— now somehow alive— residing in suburban bliss, not entirely sure of why they are cycling through various eras of television history and encountering veteran Marvel performers like Kat Dennings ( as her Thor character, Darcy Lewis) and Randall Park ( reprising his Ant- Man and the Wasp role of Jimmy Woo) aswell as new additions to the roster, like Teyonah Parris ( as Monica Rambeau) and Kathryn Hahn ( playing a perplexingly nosy neighbour named Agnes).
As with many of the Marvel movies, there is also a central mystery running through Wand a Vision, asking viewers to ponder the ever- changing reality that envelops its romantic leads.
Jac Schaeffer, the head writer, said that the show’s comic exterior was into lure its audience into its further layers of intrigue. “You enter a sitcom episode with the understanding it’s going to make you feel good and it’s all going to be O Kat the end,” said Schaeffer, who alsoworked on Captain Marvel and Black Widow.
What Wanda Vision adds to this formula, she said, is an element of “creepiness— the idea of shattering that safety in a calculated way.”
Matt Shakman, who directed all nine episodes of Wanda Vision, said that the series ultimately tells a story of “grief and trauma and howwe hold on to our hope.”
“Wanda is probably the person who has suffered themost of anyone in the MCU,” he added. “And so the showis always grounded in that. Even though what you see are faithfully re- created television shows, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye.”
Shakman has previously directed shows like Game of Thrones, Succession and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and was himself a child actor on TV sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes and Just the Ten of Us. Directing Wand a Vision, he said, was
“a gloriously schizophrenic job” that somedays required orchestrating action sequences on green- screen sets and somedays involved shooting on the same sitcom stages where he once worked.
Had events unfolded according to Marvel’s earlier plans, the debut of Wand a Vision would have followed the theatrical releases of movies like Black Widow, Eternals and Shang- Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, aswell as the premiere of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, an action- oriented Disney+ series in a more familiar, Avengers- like mode.
The pandemic required Marvel to reorganise this roll- out, but Feige said that the studio’s carefully planned master narrative, stretched across its films and TV shows, had not been significantly affected.
The creation of Wanda Vision was also affected by the pandemic; its actors left an environment in which they could freely mingle with co- workers and returned to one, several months later, where “you finish your scene and you get whisked away into these hermetically sealed bubbles,” Bettany said.
“I had a hard time with that,” Olsen said, her voice hardening in exaggerated anger.
In that sense, the actors said, perhaps itwas fitting that Wanda Vision should reach audiences at this moment, when both its narrative message and its making- of process reflect a human desire to keep going, no matter how unrecognisable the world becomes .“We’ re all experiencing this extreme version of life right now,” Olsen said. But for a time, while she and her colleagues finished theirwork on the series,“We created this microcosm of humanity where we could communicate and problem- solve together,” she added. “Therewas something great about coming towork and experiencing that.”
“It’s daunting to take these characters and put the mon a small screen. There’s a lot of firsts that area little scary as an actor.” ELIZABETH OLSEN ★ Actress