'Weird is good': Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen on superhero sitcom WandaVision
Marvel’s 2020 should have gone much differently. Its Black Widow movie and The Eternals should both have been released last year, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings imminent. But the pandemic struck and now all three have been booted into the middle distance. And so it has now been 18 months since we last heard from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when Avengers Endgame became the highest-grossing movie ever. And in that vacuum, the question of what happens next has only grown more intense. But the answer might not be what anybody expected. Marvel is about to break its silence with WandaVision – and it’s a huge departure. Not only is it the first TV show produced by Marvel Studios, it is also presented in the form of a halfhour sitcom. It is no exaggeration to call WandaVision the weirdest thing Marvel has ever done.
“Weird is good,” says Marvel Studio president Kevin Feige from beneath his trademark baseball cap. “I like weird. After Endgame, after the completion of a 23-movie Infinity Saga, we were soul-searching about what was coming next. WandaVision being our first for Disney+ is perfect. It was always about pushing the boundaries of storytelling, doing something we could only do with the narrative structure of television.”
That is certainly true. One way of viewing WandaVision is as a love letter to television. Each episode takes its inspiration from a different decade of classic US suburban sitcom, with Wanda Maximoff (AKA Scarlet Witch) and Vision playing the lead characters. They have always been an unlikely pair. Scarlet Witch is a mutant with the power of “chaos magic”, or the ability to “warp reality and bring total destruction to the cosmos”. Meanwhile, Vision is a near-indestructible, density-changing, super-intelligent android. Classic sitcom stuff, in other words.
The first show, a homage to The Dick Van Dyke Show, is in black and white, with a studio audience and 4:3 screen ratio. There’s a Bewitched episode, a Brady Bunch episode, all the way through to Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family. It’s a fun ride and, in the chronology of the MCU, one that takes place after Endgame. But hang on, didn’t Vision meet a sticky end in 2018’s Infinity War? He is dead, right?
“Yes. Dead as an android can be,” replies Paul Bettany, who played Vision in the movie and continues in the role here. It’s the same non-answer vagueness anyone involved in Marvel will summon whenever you ask them anything. “Can an android ever live?” he adds, unhelpfully. Perhaps sensing my frustration, he tries to attack the question from the perspective of an actor, rather than a flying purple synthezoid.
“I had just been killed – twice – and my contract was up,” he says. “I got a call from the boss saying, ‘Come into the office.’ So I looked at my wife and I was like, ‘I think I’m being written out.’ Being British, I didn’t want anybody to feel uncomfortable, so I said, ‘It’s absolutely fine. It’s been a wonderful run and thank you so much.’ And Kevin looked at me and went, ‘Are you quitting?’ And I went, ‘Are you firing me?’ And he went, ‘No, we’re going to pitch you a TV show.’ And I went, ‘Oh, OK.’”
Perhaps the answer lies with Scarlet Witch. After all, she has been on a relentless bummer of a journey since joining the MCU. Her brother was killed, she caused an accident that set about the events of Civil War, and she watched her robot boyfriend get murdered twice in row, once by her. There is some speculation that Scarlet Witch has now used her powers to warp reality in order to deal with her bereavement, living out a happy life in the most idealised form possible, a mid-century American sitcom where all problems can be resolved within 30 minutes. If that’s the case, it makes WandaVision a show about grief, right?
“I think we feel comfortable saying that, yes,” is the hesitant answer from Elizabeth Olsen, who has played Scarlet Witch since 2014. “I think it’s about grief and coming to terms with one’s life and trauma. And processing.” At least this is a field that Olsen understands. Prior to WandaVision, she had just completed the critically adored Facebook series Sorry for Your Loss, where she played a woman similarly ravaged by the death of a loved one. I mention the similarity, clumsily labelling her The Grief Lady.
“Oh my God, tell me about it,” she sighs. “I was really holding on to the sitcom element of this show. I was like, ‘This is the greatest gig I’ve ever had.’ It was so freeing. I really did kind of become The Grief Lady, but we got to tell this story with such playfulness. It didn’t feel just like a heavy experience.”
Nor is it to watch. Despite the potential for doom, WandaVision is first and foremost a sitcom, peppered with classic sitcom storylines. The first episode, about all the zany mishaps that occur when Scarlet Witch hosts Vision’s boss for dinner, should appeal to anyone who enjoyed the Steamed Hams episode of The Simpsons, while it probably isn’t a spoiler to reveal that Vision spends much of another episode drunk because the gears in his tummy get clogged up with chewing gum.
WandaVision’s director Matt Shakman puts the period faithfulness down to a “sitcom bootcamp” he put the cast and crew through. A longtime director of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – and before that a sitcom child actor – he was determined the series should avoid the pitfalls of parody. “The shows had to be authentic,” he says. “That meant doing the homework of just watching a lot of old television. But then, even more fun, we got to talk to people who worked on these shows. We tracked them down. We had a fabulous lunch with Dick Van Dyke. We read books about the making of these shows.” The lighting was authentic. The lenses were authentic. And Marvel didn’t even blink