Elizabeth Olsen on how difficult it was to play Wanda in DOCTOR STRANGE 2 when the writers weren’t watching WANDAVISION

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

For fans, her story carried over from this series to her next appearance in the Marvel sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), but if you felt like Wanda’s story was reworked a bit in the movie, that’s because she made the movie before the show was over, so her writers didn’t know everything she’s already been 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 Wanda Vision in their film, since 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 may be parallel stories being told there, about dealing with grief and loss. Well, I pitched it to the writers who wrote Multiverse of madness. I said ‘You know what we do in it? Wanda Vision? Have you seen it?’ and no, they hadn’t seen it, because it wasn’t finished yet.”

This left Olsen in a situation where she felt she should honor the character work she had done, especially knowing that fans would see the series before the film. But he also couldn’t share anything about the show. She continued:

“So I had to try and, I don’t know, play it differently, right? I had to approach the same themes in a way that was interesting to me, I think, and potentially to the audience. I just had to approach it from a different point of view so that is not repetitive.”

I thought she did a great job, and it honestly felt like a continuation because we had stopped feeling the loss of her family and the increase in her power, and that’s where we found her in the film. It seems ridiculous to me that the writers of the film weren’t involved in the story by the head of the MCU Kevin Feige however, only for reasons of cohesion. I guess it was all good though!