WANDAVISION Producer Explains Pietro's Role in yhe Story and Why They Cast Evan Peters

While I loved Marvel’s WandaViasion, one of my biggest issues with it was the casting of Evan Peters as Pietro, a.k.a. Quicksilver. It made me and a lot of other fans think that Wanda has used her power to rip open the multiverse and pull this character out of Fox’s Marvel universe. When that didn’t end up being the case I was left with a little disappointment. With the way things turned out, I would have much rather seen another actor in the role, someone that wouldn’t have given fans false hope.

Like many of you, I’ve been wondering why they took this direction with the character. Well, producer Mary Livanos has offered an explanation. I know some fans think we haven’t seen the last of Ralph Bohner, but it sounds like maybe we have. During an interview with CB, Livanos said:

"The idea of bringing Evan into the universe as this 'Quicksilver' really presented itself when we were figuring out Agatha's plot. Because the villain plot really was to make Wanda feel unsure about her power. At this point in Wanda's sort of grieving process, we wanted her to be unsure about what she was capable of, about what she was doing, was her subconscious acting out again? We wanted Wanda to believe that her powers could be on the fritz.”

She went on to say:

"In our studies of grief and grieving, a side effect that we found is when you lose someone, the details of memory recall can get fuzzy. So the idea that she kind of forgot exactly what her brother's face looked like, and perhaps her powers have been acting out again, we found really compelling.”

That totally makes sense. I did not think of that and I do like that approach, but why did it have to be Evan Peters in the role? Well, she goes on to say:

“And we wanted the audience to be as confounded as Wanda and so Evan was the obvious choice for that. Though we knew that we wanted to sort of upend expectations. And so when we brought Evan in and explained exactly what the character was and where he ends up as Ralph, Evan was game. And we're so grateful for that."

So, Peters was the obvious choice to mess with the fans. In my opinion, bringing Peters on board was more of a distraction from the actual point of the character, which was explained by the producer. That point might have been lost because the fans were thinking it was Quicksilver from another universe. Some fans even thought Peters was Mephisto for some damn reason. That theory never made sense to me. But, in the end, none of the theories were right.

However, thanks to this explanation, I have a better understanding of the character and why he was included in the story, and I like it. I wonder how fans would have reacted to him if it was a different actor in the role.