Over the course of her singularly unpredictable three-decade profession, Kathryn Hahn has introduced her signature wit to a plethora of genres: crime procedurals (“Crossing Jordan”), horror (“The Visit”), ensemble comedies (“Step Brothers,” “Bad Moms”) and existential dramedies (“Tiny Beautiful Things,” “Mrs. Fletcher”).
However within the Disney+ collection “Agatha All Along,” Hahn pulls from all of the disparate strands of her physique of labor to play the perfidious, power-hungry witch Agatha Harkness. It’s a job that finds Hahn — currently identified for portraying messy antiheroines — on the peak of her powers.
“By the end of the show, I would go into hair and makeup at the end of the day and be like, ‘Well, this is my last acting job,’ because I felt like I had a chance to do it all. But it really just reopened my hunger and love for performing,” Hahn says in a latest interview. “I do feel like this is exactly the part I’m supposed to play at this period of my life.”
Although she had watched live-action Marvel motion pictures along with her two kids and voiced Doc Ock in “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse,” Hahn by no means anticipated to hitch the MCU full-time. However in 2019, quickly after a basic assembly with Marvel executives, Hahn was pitched the high-concept restricted collection “WandaVision,” predecessor to “Agatha All Along.” In “WandaVision,” she would play Agatha, the nosy neighbor of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Imaginative and prescient (Paul Bettany). Agatha, it’s finally revealed, has a secret id.
Kathryn Hahn says she and “Agatha All Along” creator Jac Schaeffer wished to take care of the “acerbic, sarcastic, self-involved” demeanor of her “WandaVision” character within the Disney+ spinoff collection.
(Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel)
“WandaVision” creator Jac Schaeffer’s need to pay homage to basic sitcoms in a meditation on grief intrigued Hahn, who acknowledged elements of her scrappy, naturally performative youthful self in Agatha. And who wouldn’t need to play a shape-shifting, centuries-old witch?
Very like her character, Hahn has grown into her energy over time. In her 20s and early 30s, Hahn remembers being advised that the roles she was being supplied would progressively dwindle — if not by the point she grew to become a mom, then by the point she reached center age. That perspective towards feminine performers has begun to shift in recent times, with Hahn becoming a member of a rising variety of girls who are actually producing and starring in their very own initiatives.
“I feel like the work that I’ve been able to do post having children and post my 40s has been the most fulfilling since I was doing theater back in the day. I’ve felt the most relaxed and excited and not so fearful of doing something wrong but being really confident in the choices I’m making,” says Hahn, who believes girls’s lives really get richer with age. “I think the audience wants to see juicy, complicated, not-young women all the time — no offense to the amazing young women in our business.”
In the summertime of 2021, a number of months after “WandaVision” premiered to acclaim, Hahn realized that Schaeffer was creating a continuation of Agatha’s story. Of their earliest conversations, Hahn and Schaeffer knew they wished to take care of the character’s “acerbic, sarcastic, self-involved” demeanor whereas inserting her ready the place she begrudgingly must kind a coven to journey the fabled “Witches’ Road” and reclaim the facility that Wanda had stripped of her on the finish of “WandaVision.”
(Emil Ravelo/For The Occasions)
Within the course of, “Agatha” serves as an origin story of types for the depraved witch. The present reveals that Agatha’s nihilistic malevolence stems from her tortured relationship along with her mom, who advised her she was inherently and irredeemably evil and tried to kill her along with her personal coven. She additionally feels super disgrace and guilt over being unable to avoid wasting her son, Nicky, whose life she had tried to increase by killing different witches. A grasp of speaking inside turmoil with a single freighted look, Hahn is ready to provide gripping, albeit fleeting, home windows into Agatha’s vulnerability.
Just lately persuaded by her teen daughter, Mae, to hitch social media, Hahn abstains from studying the feedback. So, other than the posts she is shipped or finds on her timeline, she is “blessedly” unaware of how followers have reacted. “But I do know how proud we are of it and how subversive and radical it felt to have an ending, especially a big Marvel show, be that small and tender and have this little beating heart,” she says.
Talking once more by telephone a number of days after the “Agatha” finale — which ends with Agatha sacrificing her life and agreeing to behave as a type of non secular information to Wanda’s son, Billy a.okay.a. Wiccan (Joe Locke), as he searches for his lacking twin brother — Hahn insists that she has but to have any conversations about her future within the MCU.
“Even though obviously now Billy/Wiccan is not her son, there is some sort of hope for her that she’s able to maybe do for him what she couldn’t do for Nicky. I think they do make a great team. Of course, I love this part and I love Joe Locke madly, and we’ll see what the future holds,” Hahn says. “In my mind, this was a beautiful and satisfying way to say goodbye to this incredible character I had to play.”