Disney Plus’ WandaVision ended, with the home industry of WandaVision theories drying up along with it, but a whole new subgenre of WandaVision discussions arose to fill the hexagon-shaped hole in our hearts: the “please explain WandaVision for us ”interview format. Earlier this week, series creator Matt Shakman spoke with Kevin Smith to talk about what was happening to Agatha Harkness’s bunny, revealing that there was an excluded scene where he turned into a demon, and now the head writer Jac Schaeffer gave some revelations of his own to The Hollywood Reporter– including an explanation of why Evan Peters was cast as the fake version of Pietro and how Disney’s public relations machine inadvertently spoiled what the writers thought would be a really cool twist.
As for Peters, who played a different incarnation from Wanda’s brother, Pietro, in Fox’s X-Men films, Schaeffer says she didn’t want her appearance to be “a trick”, but rather a goal twist in the fact that Wanda knows he “supposed be her brother ”, but clearly it is not”. Schaeffer says he thought a good way to let the public share that “something is wrong here” was to cast Peters, because they would immediately recognize that he is not the right version of Pietro (who was played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson at MCU’s Avengers: Age of Ultron) It is a reasonable explanation, certainly, but it can be argued that the same exact result could have been achieved by casting any actor other than Taylor-Johnson, and then no one would have drawn any hasty conclusions about the X-Men being integrated into the MCU.
On a similar note, it seems that Schaeffer didn’t really expect Marvel fans to run theories as much as they did, saying she “got a little nervous” when ideas about Mephisto or Magneto started to gain momentum online. She says she “didn’t want to break any promises” with the show, but at the same time they never really suggested that there would be “some great bad man” running things behind the scenes. Wanda’s pain has always been considered the “final antagonist”, so it seems that there has never been a point where any greater threat from the comics than Agatha Harkness would be involved.
Another interesting detail of the interview is that Schaeffer says he had no intention of announcing that Teyonah Parris was playing Monica Rambeau (last seen as a child in Captain Marvel) in advance. That means that revealing that she wasn’t just a neighbor named Geraldine would have been a big shock, but Disney and Marvel Studios ended up casually spoiling that comeback at Comic-Con years ago while Schaeffer and the other writers were still putting together the story they wanted to tell.
Instead of resenting it, however, Schaeffer acknowledges that the turnaround simply fell differently than intended. Instead of thinking she was nobody special and then finding out the truth, fans knew she was someone special in advance, but then they had a chance to experience the mystery of why the show – and the show inside a show – he was pretending otherwise. Now, does anyone have any doubts about WandaVision can someone on the creative team approach? Maybe “why did the special space truck Monica wanted to drive for Hex suck?”
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