If you have not watched the final two episodes of “Agatha All Along,” we suggest you stop reading this story and rectify that immediately. Spearheaded by creator and executive producer Jac Schaeffer, the nine-episode limited series introduced pivotal new characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, featured awards-worthy performances from Kathryn Hahn, Patti LuPone, and Sasheer Zamata, among others, and featured a tonal shift that shouldn’t have worked, but succeeded smashingly. Yes, despite a seemingly rocky start, as a whole, “Agatha All Along” is so impressive it may have surpassed its predecessor, “WandaVision,” as one of the best projects Marvel Studios has ever produced. And, yes, we realize those are big shoes, or maybe capes, to fill.
READ MORE: “Agatha All Along” Execs Says The Show Will Feature Crucial ‘WandaVision”‘ Threads
Yesterday, Schaeffer jumped on a Zoom to talk with The Playlist about episodes eight and nine, “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End” and “Maiden Mother Crone.” We had just 20 minutes of the writer and director’s time, but we could have asked her questions for well over an hour (and probably annoyingly longer than that). Join us as we attempt to go down the Witches’ Road one more time, won’t you?
Oh, once again, there are major spoilers ahead regarding several major characters. You’ve been warned.
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The Playlist: Congratulations. I could talk to you for an hour, about the last two episodes alone. But my first question for you is, tell me why can’t there be a second season? Considering how it ended how could this not be an ongoing series?
Jac Schaffer: There’s not a reason it can’t happen. It’s just right now there’s nothing I can report about that. That’s what my answer is.
O.K. So, if you can’t report that, is that potentially one of the reasons why you’re not involved with “Vision Quest” any longer?
No, I am already…
You’re getting in trouble. I know. [Laughs.]
No, it’s just hard to talk about. And I also, I am like today, I don’t have to worry about spoilers, but, yeah
I will ask one other thing that’s not really a spoiler. After the success of these two shows, why, and, this is such an industry question, why has Dana Walden and Marvel not locked you up with some sort of long-term development deal? Or do you not want it? Do you want to be somewhere else?
I mean, that’s very lovely and flattering. I mean, I’m here to chat about the show.
O.K. I guess one of my questions was how did you feel when you found out that the final two episodes were going to be dropped at the same time when you have an incredible cliffhanger at the end of episode eight?
That’s a really good question. Initially, I was disappointed, and I was sort of resistant to it. I mean, not in an aggressive way. They told me that, and I felt we had built this incredible cliffhanger and that my old brain was like, “Nielsen ratings, everyone will be coming back for the next episode the next week.” But first of all, streaming works differently. And this was still when we were in post-production, so we were still cutting the episodes and putting it all together. And then, as I sort of considered the idea and understood the reasons behind it, I actually think it’s lovely. I think that the episodes are lovely companion pieces. I think audiences had really been clamoring for more and feeling like the episodes were a little short. So by the time were, I had sort of accepted it, but then as the rollouts have been happening, I’ve been increasingly grateful that the episodes dropped together the way that they did.
When you and the writing staff were coming up with the idea for the storylines for the show, what came first: the idea of having Billy manifesting the road or the idea that Agatha had used this sort of con of the road over the centuries to feed her power?
I’m fairly certain that Billy creating the road was the first idea, but we were sort of simultaneously working on this idea of the ballad and the ballad being a spell, and the ballad opens the door to the road. That was very much in the process, and we were also simultaneous to that, working on that like Agatha’s deep pain and deep truth was the story of Nicholas Scratch, that it would be about a boy who died. In the comics, Nicholas Scratch is a villain and a grown man, and there’s a whole host of things, and we were already circling the idea that he was a child that died. And I actually was talking to the writer’s room. We were all texting the last couple of days, and I was trying to get to the bottom of what was the order of the ideation. And it’s kind of impossible because it was such a group think, and there were so many beautiful ideas, and there were versions where they were all kind of intermingled. But for me, what I ultimately ended up latching onto is I loved this sort of double twist of Billy made the road, which was a twist that people rightly anticipated and felt very tied to Wandavision and very correct for this sort of MCU of it. But that, truly, truly, at the end of the day, it is Agatha all along, and actually, heartbreakingly, it’s Nicky all along. That it was this boy who came up with the ballad that is the spine of the show, that’s what I really became enamored with.
When you were having those conversations, if in theory, this is all something that has been manifested by Billy, what were the conversations to then keep the deaths of the other coven members?
Yeah, I mean, it was a very long conversation. It was something that we were actually still deliberating on, really, once they were cast. And I think even once we were shooting, I think we were still trying to decide if they would really die or not. And it was a conversation with Marvel, an ongoing one with Brad [Winderbaum] and with Kevin [Feige], and I wrote scenes where they lived, and it always had that dream cheapness to it. They were good scenes. Laura Donney wrote a particularly good scene, but they just felt wrong. They felt disrespectful. This is a show that’s about death. We take Nicholas Scratch’s death very seriously. His death is permanent. She’s not trying to resurrect him. And it felt wrong to have that be the linchpin of the show and the source of Agatha’s pain and then let everybody else off the hook. And where we landed was the deaths. They’re all different. And the journeys for each of these women are all different. And Jennifer [Sasheer Zamata] does survive. And so there’s a naturalism to me in that, which is kind of ironic to say, talking about a superhero show, but I believe that the types of deaths that we feature and the types of life journeys we feature, they’re all distinct. And that feels, again, to use the word, it feels respectful to these characters that we wanted to fully realize.
And you do have that scene where Ali Ahn’s character is brought by death to the next place. What made you guys decide to show her taking that road as opposed to Patti LuPone or Deborah Jo Rupp’s characters?
We wanted to see Death do her quote-unquote job. We wanted to see what that looked like. We wanted to see her in that look. And I wanted to give voice to kind of what everybody feels about Alice. This is unfair. This isn’t right. But that happens in life. There’s unfairness everywhere. Sometimes, death feels unfair. Sometimes, life feels unfair. And it felt like at that moment in the show, it’s sort of a dark night of the soul. We have that scene, and then we see Jen’s grief-stricken reaction to Lilia dying. Then we see Agatha in closeup slow motion, panicked on the road. So it all sort of felt like a piece that we would show the side of death, the reality of death that is dark and impossible to cope with on the heels of seeing the beauty and the surrender and the acceptance that is possible because everyone’s journey is different. And also, we love Ali, and we love Alice, and I didn’t feel done with her. So, that’s how we squared that.
Someone suggested this on Twitter last night that I thought was so interesting is that, and I’m wondering if this is one of the narrative themes of both “Agatha” and “WandaVision” that both Wanda and Agatha just wanted to be with their child or children? Was that a theme you guys were conscious of in the writing room that sort of tied the two series together, or was that just a coincidence?
No, no. It’s tied. And really, what I was interested in illuminating was the difference in their stories. Wanda’s story, especially as an Avenger, is very public, and there’s so much spectacle to it, and there’s so much sort of supernatural auspices. These are children she created from Chaos Magic. There’s the sitcom overlay. Everybody saw the kids, everybody. We all know that she brought the hex down, and they disappeared. There’s just so much theatricality to it. And I was very interested in doing the exact inverse for Agatha, that her story with her son would be very small, very, very human, very, very private and intimate. And that would also be the direct opposite of Agatha, the public-facing character that she, I’ve said this before, that I feel she has drag queen energy. She’s so performative. She wears so many masks. There’s so much code-switching. There’s so much conning. And the idea that her truth would be just this human boy who died and that they’re in nature, and that there isn’t the hair, makeup, or wardrobe. So it just felt like a polar opposite to Wanda. But as you say, it’s still a fundamental necessity. Let me be with my child, which is universal.
In the eighth episode, Nicholas asks his mom not to kill someone, and then that night, that’s when Death comes from him. Is that a coincidence, or was that a sort of like Deaty saying, “O.K., Wanda, you stopped killing and feeding me. Your son’s time is over.” Is it his fault that her time ended?
That was never our intention. I don’t like to stand in the way of interpretations of our work, especially in this space. I delight in fan theories, but as petty as Rio Vidal is in her romantic relationship with Agatha, I do not think that she is vindictive in her job. I think it is her job to be impartial and connected to nature. And so we wrote it that it just was time.
Was there a discussion about the big kiss between Rio and Agatha at the end, or did no one care? Go for it. No big deal.
There certainly was no fight and no pushback. It was always going to be a kiss of death. So, I think the success of it inside Marvel was that it checked the box for the writers and my fellow collaborators that we wanted to see these two women kiss. But it also has the pyrotechnics of an MCU plot line. They kiss. Agatha takes on some of death’s powers. No human can take that on and live. And so she dies. And it was always going to be this sort of ecstasy of supercharged nature. That was my hope. We did all this sort of in the writer’s room. We became obsessed with nurse logs, the sort of life and death and constant flow. And so our idea was that Agatha would turn into a nurse log, and that sort of iterated and evolved, but it just felt so beautiful that she would take on death and it would just continue to flow. It would be death and life and death and life. So, that’s the poetry of it, but also the Marvel spectacle of it.
You were creatively successful with “WandaVision,” but I almost feel the change in tone from some of the early episodes, especially to the last three, was much more dramatic for “Agatha.” Not that the other episodes aren’t cinematic, but it just sort of goes for another style and tone. Is that something that excites you? How conscious were you of taking these jumps?
It’s thrilling. To me, it’s the whole reason I do this. It’s just ecstatic to me when I watch content that changes it up, but confidently and with a plan and with design, and yeah, it was always the intention that we would walk a tonal highwire act like “WandaVision,” but it wouldn’t have the exact same track. We were trying to do something different, but I also didn’t want to upend anyone or make anyone feel like it was wrong or off the track. And if you look at the series, the pilot episode is quite melancholy. The “Mare of Easttown” filter, I think everyone thought was funny as a concept, but if you watch that episode, it is a melancholy, foggy, murky episode. And that was meant to hint at where we were going with the show. And then, of course, episode two is actually kind of, I think, our funniest episode because it’s the table setting, and we’re gathering all our characters, and look how everybody’s kooky. And what I hoped for is that this is a descent. Yes, it’s “Wizard of Oz,” but it’s a little bit of “Paradise Lost”. We wanted that feeling that the stakes are real, this is getting dark, and also, you are starting to care about these women because they’re real. That was our hope. And knowing that, that being the hope for the feeling of the show, that in episode six, Billy’s episode, we would start to dig into real angst, really real pathos, especially at the top of that episode with the accident. That episode starts really dramatic and then goes, it returns to the comedy in sort of a comforting way. This is the show, and we’re still here, but the top of that show with The Kaplans, it breaks my heart every time. So we hired our directors with that in mind. Rachel Goldberg handled three, four, and five, and she has comedy experience, she has experience with puppetry. She’s a theater person. She’s a bright personality herself. And so we were like, this is the person that we need for these punchier episodes. And then we hired Ganja Montero for six, eight, and nine. We knew that she could do this sort of, I don’t know, the sort of fierce drama of it, especially the Agatha – Rio tete a tete and her cinema photographer, Isiah Donté Lee also did some just extraordinarily beautiful work. We get closer to everybody in terms of lenses and how close we are to the actors. It just feels more intimate and dramatic.
I didn’t even double-check this. Did all three of you use different cinematographers?
No. Caleb Heymann was our cinematographer for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. He did one through five, and then Dante did six, eight, and nine. That was Ganja’s block. And John Chema shot my episode. John was our second unit director. Because of scheduling, we needed him to step into doing the first unit with me on episode seven. He did an extraordinary job.
My understanding of the Wiccan character is sort of limited to his initial run of the comics. I haven’t seen where he is lately, but this idea that he would be responsible for the death of three people is not something I remember that would be part of his character in the comics. That he would sort of have this dark Lord of him. Maybe he does, but how did those decisions come up in the context of introducing him to the MCU?
We were always interested in his darkness because that’s the conversation with Agatha. Agatha’s whole internal conversation is, “Am I good or am I bad?” She’s been told she’s bad by her mother and her tribe of origin, her family of origin says to her, “You’re bad.” You kind of don’t come back from that. And so we wanted her to be attracted to and fascinated by Billy’s darkness. And we wanted that conversation between the two of them. The idea is that he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of the witches. That was a conversation around, “Will they die for real, or will they not die for real?” And ultimately, we decided that in deciding that they would die, we knew that he would be sort of responsible for that. But more to the point, he would feel that responsibility. And I was interested in that. I wanted to see him be accountable and see him feel that way. Because I would argue Wanda kind of goes back and forth with that. If you look at anyone in the MCU, like villains and the characters coded as heroes, everybody’s done terrible stuff. And it’s all about context, and it’s all about how the character reacts to it. I would argue Wanda has done things that are kind of worse and has not always taken accountability. And what we liked for Billy is that he does. He is this new witch. He’s this novice witch. We play all this inexperience on him, but when confronted with what he’s done at the end of episode nine, he really takes it seriously. There are no jokes. I like that for him moving forward. I think that there’s wisdom there, and I’m so interested to see where he goes because of that.
I have one last quick question for you, though. It must have been a year and a half ago, but Patti Lupon was on a red carpet, and they asked her about “Agatha” and she said it’s a musical. And everyone thought it was a musical for a year and a half. And while there are musical aspects to it, it’s not a musical. But people took her for her word. Did you think that was funny? Did you think, “Oh no, people are going to not watch because they think it’s ‘Into the Woods'”?
I didn’t worry about people not watching because [that’s] beyond my control, but Patti said a number of things early on that we were all like [reacts], but that became its own thing. Like Patti LuPone can’t stop, won’t stop. And I love watching her press because the lady has no Fs left to give. I don’t know if she ever had any Fs to give. So bless Patti Lone, and it’s my hope that we can see her again at some point.
“Agatha All Along” is available in its entirety on Disney+
