Note: The following contains spoilers for “Agatha All Along” Episode 3
The trials of the witches’ road have begun on “Agatha All Along” and sadly, they have also claimed the life of one Mrs. Hart — sorry, Sharon. She preferred Sharon.
In Episode 3 of Marvel’s newest series, now streaming on Disney+, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and her new coven properly begin their journey down the witches’ road, which promises trials that require each of their skills.
The first trial trapped the women (and Teen) in a wine night at a mysterious beachside house a la “Big Little Lies” — the women even joke about its resemblance to “Huge Tiny Lies.” They’re presented with a wine, which they quickly realize is poisoned.
Only Jen’s potion-making abilities can save them, as they work together to find the ingredients for an antidote. Eventually they do make it out, but Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) doesn’t survive the ordeal.
And yes, “Agatha All Along” showrunner Jac Schaeffer knows how bummed you are about that death — she shares the disappointment. But, as she sits down with TheWrap for our weekly episodic debrief, she explains why it was necessary.
Strap in folks, it’s time to go down, down, down the road of “Agatha All Along” Episode 3.
I want to go for one of the big things first, because there’s an explicit mention of Mephisto. Being so online during the “WandaVision” era, knowing that the Mephisto discourse was what it was, I just thought it was so, so funny. So, how did you decide “OK we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna say his name, and we’re just gonna light it all on fire.”
So, with “WandaVision” — again, this is me embarrassing myself in print — I didn’t really know who Mephisto was when “WandaVision” dropped. There was the wine bottle that was a prop that had something on the wine label, that prop master Russell Bobbitt had put on, that I was, like, unaware of.
And obviously, now I’m familiar with the ways in which Mephisto ties into everything. So it was a shock to the writer’s room that the Mephisto piece took off the way it did with “WandaVision.” And yes, this scene in Episode 3, [executive producer] Mary Livanos and I talked, and we were like, “We gotta say the man’s name” (laughs).
I hate to keep bringing “Hocus Pocus” into the conversation, but Russell Bobbitt sure was the prop master on that film.
I knew that, because when we were designing the Darkhold he was like, “Well, when I designed the book for ‘Hocus Pocus’…”
Wait, tell me about that conversation! Was there a discussion of emulating the Book?
Well, because Mary Livanos, I think she, in the conversation, she was like, “Well, there’s a thing about how the Darkhold is made of human flesh.” And he was like, “Well, in Hocus Pocus, there’s…” and we were like, “Well, we can’t be like ‘Hocus Pocus,’ so the Darkhold will look different.”
And that happens a lot at Marvel where you’re like, “Holy cow, this person I’m talking to has worked on, like, everything that was important to me in my childhood.” So Russell’s like that, where he’s like, “Over here, when I did this show, and this show.”
So, yeah, there was an attempt at that time to make the Darkhold look different than Book.
OK, circling back to Mephisto, you decided you’re gonna say his name. I have to imagine that everything is so thought out in this series, so it’s hard for me to believe that this would be a dead end. Is Mephisto actually going to come into play?
I mean, you know I can neither confirm or nor deny. I will say that that scene that you’re talking about, between Jen and Teen is really about all of the conflicting rumors about Agatha. That’s really — the takeaway there is what is the true story? There’s this, there’s that, there’s this, there’s that. But who really knows? The only thing that people do know is that she’s always been up to to bad things.
I want to float another theory by you. Because there was very definitely a mysterious man in Episode 1, when Agatha goes to the library, and he’s creepily like, “There was a fire.” Now, he could just be a pyro man hanging out in Westview. Then again, maybe he could be Mephisto. How do you feel about this theory?
I would say that that theory is an overreach (laughs). With the “Mare” [of Easttown] overlay, we couldn’t bring a mountain into that set. So we wanted that, for just the aesthetic of it, we wanted to look like it had been charred, torched, and that felt very witchy and very cool. So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and say that one is a little bit much.
I appreciate it, because this is what happens when you’ve been a fan of Marvel for years. You reach for anything, and fans will grab at anything!
I know! And I really don’t like to shoot theories down, mostly because I feel like it ruins the fun, you know? That’s what I want to manifest, is as much fun as possible for the audience. But yeah, if I’m asked directly about something that feels very like peripheral or off the spine, I’m like “Yeah, we can go ahead and, as a team, we can all set that one down.”
OK let’s get into the first trial. I mean this whole episode, it’s basically a giant escape room, but it’s a very Nancy Meyers escape room. I just want to know what inspired the look and the feel of it.
So in the writer’s room, we were just chock-a-block full of ideas. When we committed to the witches’ road, we were like, “How in the world do we create a system that makes sense? That feels like it has a progression, where we can get lots of different looks, lots of different genre nods.” We just had a million kind of ways to skin the cat.
And then I personally just had spaces I wanted to visit. From the very beginning, before the writer’s room, I wanted to be in like a hyper-feminized space. I wanted to be somewhere that felt like the complete opposite of what Agatha is, you know? The original idea was a baby shower. She makes that joke, we see the invitation, like, I wanted her at a baby shower, I wanted her in a sweater set.
And that’s also the hook for the show, is the most hated witch has to coven up and that is her personal nightmare. So at the top, I wanted to push her into a space that felt totally wrong for her. And also, in Episode 2, we do all of this ramp-up about how the road is going to kill you, and the road is a death wish, and the road is the scariest thing, and our nightmares, and all these things.
So it just felt like the first one out of the gate needed to be the most benign, the most innocuous. But then, when you really squint at it, and like, as a woman, when you really think about it, you know, those “Big Little Lies” ladies will cut you. Like that’s actually the most dangerous environment to be a lady. And that’s what I love.
So this is a very long way around, Andi, to explain this. But in looking at spaces where women gather, and spaces where there are groups of women, where there is both sisterhood and rivalry, this sort of Nancy Meyers rom-com, prestige melodrama, TVLand aesthetic felt very ripe and very fertile, and also, just for me, wildly hilarious.
Well and it also gave you the opportunity just for more very excellent looks for the ladies.
100%! Also having set up all of these witches as being so hardcore, and then to soften them, but then the environment is still ultimately hardcore, also felt really great.
And then we went really far, from the wardrobe, hair, makeup, production design. But if you listen to the score when they first enter, we were like “OK, so what does our music sound like piped through the Nancy Meyers rom-com, turtleneck-wearing, coastal grandma chic?”
Very “The Holiday”-y!
Yes! Which like, I love that content. I’m an enormous fan of Nancy Meyers. Nora Ephron is like, my patron saint, you know what I mean? This is what I worship. But again, it’s an opportunity, like “Mare of Easttown,” to be like these texts that I adore. How do we pull them into this system?
I’m curious, is it harder to sort of pay homage just in vibes, and looks, and whatnot? In “WandaVision,” you do explicit homages to these shows. It’s very clear it was “Modern Family” and it was these very clear-cut things. It’s just as clear in Agatha for “Mare,” but it’s also more kind of the ambience of others. So, in that sense, is one harder than the other?
I would say this one is harder. I think that “WandaVision,” yeah, with each episode, we always had such a strong true north. And the sitcoms are — I would not say they are easy to replicate, but by their nature, every episode sort of duplicates the last, you know?
There’s very little change until like, the kids get too old and they throw in the baby, you know what I mean? It’s the same, same, same. And that’s part of what we were trying to zero in on and kind of send up.
This one, truthfully, gave me pains because it wasn’t so specific, it wasn’t so boxed off. And I really like an airtight system. The sort of turning point for me was realizing that our protagonist is so different from Wanda. That Agatha is messy, has so many influences, wears so many masks, has so many, like, languages herself.
She can sort of slip, she can code switch like the best of them. And so I finally sort of relaxed, along with my team, into being like, what is fun and what makes sense through the witch filter? And maybe we don’t have to hold on so tight. Our audience is so savvy that they’re going to pick up what we’re putting down.
How online are you during all of this? Because I’m really, really enjoying watching how fans are watching this, it’s insane.
I dip in and out. I have to sort of protect myself a little bit. But part of the science of what I do and what my colleagues do is the sort of breadcrumbs. And so, of course I’m going to be interested in what goes as we expected, and what goes off in different directions. It’s really incredible to behold.
I can imagine! OK, we talked in our last interview about building the skill sets of each witch and deciding who was going to be in this coven. And then with Episode 3, you really get into their backstories a bit and get to kind of know who they were prior to being in this coven, when they had their powers. When you’re building this out, how do you decide what the backstory of each person is going to be?
We wanted all of these women to feel real. We wanted them each to have different reasons for coming on the road and sort of like, they each have a distinct problem. The problem being, what is standing between this witch and her power? So that was the thing that we had to kind of distill.
And then it’s like, what have their lives been up until this point? We had an abundance of material, but the problem then became we have limited real estate, so how do we get it in? And the way you do that is just a good old “Event Horizon” structure (laughs). Right? Isn’t that what all screenwriters have in their toolbox, is just go back to the OG, go back to “Event Horizon” (laughs).
But in all seriousness, we knew we were going to loosely sort of focus on a witch in different episodes, but in our first sequence on the road, our first trial, that we would need to drop a good breadcrumb per witch.
And so the writer of this episode, Kim Squires, who did a phenomenal job, that was the work of the like, “OK, here are the backstories that we’ve created. And then how do we distill it for a hallucination each, that piques the interest of the audience and that we can play forward from that moment?”
Do we actually know how old each of the witches are? It’s joked about in Episode 2 but like, how old is Patti Lupone’s witch and Agatha, actually?
I don’t think we ever say their actual, specific [ages]. [Agatha’s] like 432 or something like that. Lilia (Lupone) is a bit older than Agatha. I have a document somewhere where I did the math for each witch and know how old they are. And it’s sort of lost.
But actually, it was a very, very early concept in the room, in thinking about witches we did an exercise about, like, what is their value system, right? They value nature, and they value power, and they value community, and it was really important to us that they value age.
So that back and forth in Episode 2, Agatha inadvertently insults Lilia by thinking that she’s younger than she actually is. It’s kind of a background detail, but this is a community, this is a culture that values age and wisdom. So Lilia is the oldest, then Agatha, then Jen (Sasheer Zamata), then Alice (Ali Ahn).
All right well, speaking of the others, let’s talk about it. Jac, I gotta be honest, I’m a little mad at you for this one. How very dare you kill off Mrs. Hart.
(Laughs).
And I tried to be optimistic. I was like, “Oh, no body, no death.” There’s a body, you show her face at the end. So, can you say with certainty, is this death super permanent? Is this the first casualty of the road?
So we talked a lot about death in the show. Were we going to kill people? Were we going to kill characters? And it was a long conversation. I like to have my scripts ready before we shoot, and it was a conversation that we carried, I think, through prep, even.
Mary Livanos, and Brad Winderbaum, and Kevin [Feige] and I were sort of constantly going around on it. And it just became vital to the show that we have proper stakes. That we say that the road can kill you, and it really can. Mrs. Hart is dead.
She’s so innocent! She was just having a good time!
Here’s the thing about this corner of the MCU, is that it’s not always linear. So, when someone dies, it doesn’t mean you’re never going to see them again. But Mrs. Hart, RIP. And we are nervous about people being mad (laughs). She’s so good!
And like, how can you give up a gift that is Debra Jo Rupp? It’s just — I’m mad about this one.
I know, I take it! I take it. We had a lot of conversations. Once we were cutting the episodes and we realized just what a standout she was, how incredible she was, there were conversations about how it was going to be disappointing.
But I mean, that’s really like — it’s important to us, the show is a comedy, but it is also a drama. It is also meant to break your heart. And there is something about the horror genre. When horror is really good, it takes things from you, you know? And that’s why it’s so meaningful.
And I’ve spoken a little bit to, and had sort of sidebar conversations with my colleagues about the intersection of queer culture, witch culture, horror, the horror genre. And I just think there’s something so potent about the ability to have high camp, have theatricality, have big comedy, you know, big moments of looks, and fun, and joy, but always remember the danger. The stakes and the risks.
I get it. This is another one of those things though, where I feel like it’s not going to be a one-off. Because like you said, you have to have stakes. You can’t just kill off one person in Episode 3 and then be like,”OK, we’re good!” So how concerned for the rest of the witches’ safety should we be going forward?
I would say that the stakes are real in this show. That’s really what I think people can take away from this episode, is like, all of the sort of fun, and shenanigans, and spectacle; yes, yes, to all of that, but the road is dangerous.
Note: this interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
“Agatha All Along” is now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes dropping on Wednesdays at 6 p.m. PT.
TheWrap will have a new deep dive with Schaeffer for each episode the following Monday. You can check out our breakdown of episode one here on episode two here.
