Elizabeth Olsen on How Tricky It Was to Play Wanda in DOCTOR STRANGE 2 When the Writers Never Watched WANDAVISION

For fans enmeshed in the MCU’s timeline, WandaVision (2021) came out at the perfect time. Many people were still in quarantine due to the pandemic, and movie theaters weren’t quite open yet, so new content was exciting. Then the show debuted on Disney+, and went on to be, arguably, the best Marvel show to ever hit the platform. It told an incredible story, and the acting was top notch. It launched Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) into a whole new stratosphere of story where she blurred the lines between good guy and bad, as we watched her suffer immense loss and pain amid new unseen forces.

To fans, her story went from this series to her next appearance in the Marvel sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), but if it felt to you like Wanda’s story was a little rehashed in the film, it’s because she made the movie before the show was finished, so its writers didn’t know everything she had already gone through.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, the actress explained that the writers of Multiverse of Madness did not incorporate Wanda’s character work and progression from WandaVision into their film, as they hadn’t seen it yet:  

"[WandaVision] it's a similar arc that I had to play in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. There could be parallel stories being told there, of dealing with grief and loss. Well, I proposed that to the writers who wrote Multiverse of Madness. I said 'Do you know what we're doing in WandaVision? Have you seen it?' and no, they had not seen it, because it wasn't finished yet."

That left Olsen in a situation where she felt she needed to honor the character work she'd done, especially knowing that fans would see the series before the film. But she also couldn’t share anything about the show. She went on: 

"So I had to try and, I don't know, play it differently, right? I had to attack the same themes in order for it to be interesting for me, I think, and potentially for the audience. I just had to come at it from a different point of view so that it wasn't repetitive."

I thought she did a great job, and it honestly did feel like a continuation to me because we had left off with her feeling the loss of her family and the rise of her power, and that’s where we found her in the movie. It does seem ridiculous to me that the film’s writers wouldn’t have been looped in to the story by MCU boss Kevin Feige though, just for cohesion purposes. I guess it all worked out though!