Kathryn Hahn on the “liberation” of “anger” in black comedy
Actress Kathryn Hahn talks about her new Marvel Disney+ miniseries “Agatha All Along” and explains why she enjoys black comedies.
Since the Marvel witch Agatha Harkness has so enchanted Kathryn Hahn, she did not hesitate to buy her Lego figure from Amazon.
“She has her own train; she’s holding a Darkhold. I really feel like I made it myself,” says the actress and star of the new Disney+ series “Agatha All Along.” “The sad thing is, I bought it and put it together myself, and I loved every second of it. I had yet to look at the instructions.”
Hahn, 51, has played many best friends and supporting roles in film and television over the years, but is now enjoying her latest era as a leading lady with the 2023 Hulu dramedy “Tiny Beautiful Things” and now “Agatha.” She captured the hearts and minds of superhero fans — and earned a snappy theme song — as the main antagonist of 2021’s “WandaVision”: Agatha posed as a nosy neighbor to Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) in order to use the Darkhold, a magical book, to steal Wanda’s considerable powers as Scarlet Witch.
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Agatha was defeated and Wanda took away her magical powers. Here we meet “Agatha” again (the first two episodes are streaming now, then weekly on Wednesdays). She is stuck in a “True Detective”-style TV world until her old friend and enemy Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) snaps her out of it. To get back on track, Agatha faces the trials of the mythical Witch Road with a makeshift coven that includes Teen (Joe Locke), Agatha’s young new friend who can’t pronounce his real name due to a curse.
“Through this personal journey, we’re opening up the world of the MCU to witches, which is so great, and we’re also really getting across the message of finding your own power,” Hahn says. “How do we evolve? How do we look at getting older? Can we see that the older we get, the more powerful the chapters become? That the wisdom we’ve gained becomes an asset rather than a liability is really charged and exciting.”
But Agatha has lost none of her devious nature. In WandaVision, “she enjoyed this long game of cat and mouse,” Hahn says. “You never really knew what she wanted from Wanda. Was it friendship as well as power? Was it a lover?” Her “shapeshifting” continues in the new show, albeit more subtly. “She gets to come on and gather this coven of depressing witches around her,” the actress adds with a laugh. “She tries to get one over on them every time she tries to gain sympathy. She’s the same Agatha. She just uses those tactics in a different way.”
That Agatha was getting her own spin-off was welcome news for Hahn: “I thought I’d just go along and say ‘bye,'” she says of her appearance on “WandaVision.” But her charming take on a mediocre Marvel Comics character was a hit with fans and Marvel executives. Getting the call about the show was “like a fever dream,” she says, recalling bursting into tears when one of the “WandaVision” production assistants wished her well on the first day of shooting “Agatha.”
“I never imagined something like this would happen in my career or in the future. And the fact that it’s a witch is beyond my wildest dreams.”
The actress loved diving headfirst into the comic book history of Agatha, a centuries-old character who first appeared in a 1970 issue of “Fantastic Four.” Over the decades, the character has appeared on the page as a mentor or nanny, protector or mother figure. Sometimes she’s an old woman, sometimes not so much. “There was clearly a moment when every Marvel heroine had to wear a full-body suit with a big neckline. I thought, ‘Can we bring that Agatha back?!'” Hahn jokes.
Her Agatha became a “mixing pot of a lot of different experiences,” she says. She had something of the Tin Man she played in her Cleveland high school production of “The Wizard of Oz” – “I felt like I was preparing for it with a little funnel on my head” – and also a lot of her love of dark humor. “That sense of humor has a lot of freedom and a little bit of anger, and those are qualities that I think as women we perhaps haven’t been able to express as loudly and take up as much space,” Hahn says.
She also points to her recent string of leading roles that have delved into morally gray areas, from the TV series “I Love Dick” and “Mrs. Fletcher” to films like “Private Life” and “Afternoon Delight.” “These directors (and) screenwriters really wanted the whole authentic me.”
“I know this sounds like a cliche, but I really love acting. I’m an old workaholic,” she adds. “It could be a lead role, a supporting role, it could be anything. I don’t have a big agenda, (but) I loved playing Agatha Harkness. So that was really a pleasure.”
Contributors: Gary Levin
