Agatha All Along Creator on Joe Locke Theories, Patti LuPone

SPOILER WARNING: This story includes major plot details in the first two episodes of “Agatha All Along,” currently streaming on Disney+.

In the wake of the runaway success of “WandaVision” in 2021, the show’s creator, Jac Schaeffer, immediately got to work on coming up with her next streaming series for Marvel Studios. But she found it difficult to escape her first show’s setting and one of its residents in particular: Agatha Harkness, the insidious, perfidious witch, played to the hilt by Kathryn Hahn, who fails in her attempt to steal the power of the Scarlet Witch.

“Everything I developed, I was like, ‘And then in Episode 5, they have to go to Westview for whatever reason, and this is where they run into Agatha,’” Schaeffer tells Variety. “I just couldn’t stop. I love that world.”

Eventually, Schaeffer realized that her next Marvel show should just be about Agatha, and Marvel Studios was, ahem, bewitched by the idea. Roughly three years and one false start later, the two-episode premiere opens with Agatha still trapped inside the spell cast by Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) at the end of “WandaVision,” which confined Agatha to the TV persona of Agnes, the nosy neighbor. Rather than a sitcom, however, Agnes has taken on the identity of a hardened police detective akin to characters in shows like “Mare of Easttown” — we’re even treated to fake opening credits for the show “Agnes of Westview” — who is tasked with investigating the death of a Jane Doe who bears a strong resemblance to Wanda.

Eventually, Agatha is freed from the spell after visits from another witch, Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), and a kid only known as Teen (Joe Locke) manage to shake Agatha out of her crime-show stupor. Rio, we learn, has quite a contentious history with Agatha, and wishes her dead. Teen, by contrast, says he’s an Agatha superfan who desperately wants her help to find the Witches’ Road — a mysterious domain where magically inclined folk can seek what their heart most desires. For both Teen and Agatha, that quest is for power — he doesn’t have any to start with, and she lost all of hers to Wanda. 

To get to the road, Agatha and Teen seek other down-and-out witches to form an ad-hoc coven: Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), a divination witch; Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), a potions witch; Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn), a protections witch; and Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp), a Westview resident with a particularly green thumb who Agatha knows from their “WandaVision” days as Mrs. Hart.

From there, the coven must endure a series of life-or-death trials designed to test their witchcraft before they can arrive at the end of the road — a captivating premise that also allows “Agatha All Along” to tell a cohesive story with the episodic rhythms of classic television.

In a recent interview, Schaeffer — who also directed the first two episodes — spoke with Variety about how the show came together, her biggest inspirations, what it’s like to direct Patti LuPone — and whether fans should bother trying to read Joe Locke’s lips.

“Agatha Would Love the True Crime Genre”

In her original pitch for “WandaVision,” well before the show had even started a writers’ room, Schaeffer “wanted to do a ‘CSI’ episode” — something to evoke the classic TV police procedural. When the show’s structure shifted exclusively to classic family sitcoms, that idea fell away, but after Schaeffer settled on doing an Agatha spinoff, she knew immediately that she wanted to resurrect that concept, and build the first episode around a prestige crime series.

“I think that’s what ‘WandaVision’ fans love, that fully immersed feeling inside of something that’s so familiar and dear to them,” she says. “I love gritty drama, murder mystery stuff, but I don’t ever do it because I don’t like the dead girl tropes. I don’t like how exploitative they often are. So it was such a cheat for me to be like, ‘I’m gonna put on this costume, and pretend that I’m doing one of these shows.’”

Beyond her own interest, Schaeffer also saw opening “Agatha All Along” in true-crime attire as a way to place the audience inside Agatha’s perspective on the world. “Agatha delights in seeing darkness in others, in seeing people be selfish and self-serving and nefarious,” she says. “So I believe that she would love the true crime genre — not as a viewer, but because I think she would think it points to the ugliness in people.”

“If It Doesn’t Have to Do With Witches, We’re Not Going to Use It”

While Schaeffer was certain from the start about what the first episode would be, what happened after Agatha escaped Wanda’s spell “was a really big question mark.” She knew the show had to explore – or, really, reveal — Agatha as a character. “What is under the layers?” Schaeffer asks rhetorically. “It is a constant performance, so the arc of the show is, what’s under the mask?”

What would drive the answers to those questions took a bit of time for the show’s writers to sort out. “Unlike ‘WandaVision,’ because Agatha doesn’t have her own comic, we had much more latitude to invent,” Schaeffer says. They initially set down one storytelling path that they had to abandon. Although Schaeffer declines to reveal what it was, she does indicate that it was lost to the hazards of working inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “You will often hit on something, and then you’re told no for a variety of reasons — whether or not another property is using that thing, or that particular character or actor is unavailable,” she says.

Much like “WandaVision” was built around the tropes of sitcoms, the writers ultimately decided with “Agatha” that “if it doesn’t have to do with witches, we’re not going to use it.” That guiding principle led to the idea of Agatha forming a coven that was then forced into enduring trials on the Witches Road, a concept first introduced in a Marvel comics run of “Scarlet Witch” from 2016.

“With ‘WandaVision,’ we were at once celebrating and picking apart sitcoms for the fact that it’s fraudulent — but also delighting in how cozy they are,” Schaeffer says. “In ‘Agatha,’ we’re doing that with the notion of a witch. There’s so much power, but there’s a lot of silliness and a lot of terrible traumatic history. As the show goes on, we unpack that further.”

“It’s a Horror Show, but It’s Not a Terrifying Show”

Although Schaeffer’s career as a writer as flourished, “directing is what I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “It’s what I went to film school for. I started writing so that I would have something to direct.”

Matt Shakman directed all the episodes of “WandaVision” (he’s currently helming the  2025 feature film “The Fantastic Four: First Steps”); for “Agatha All Along,” Schaeffer took on directing duties for the first, second and seventh episodes of the show.

“It was kind of terrifying to tell Kathryn,” she says. “We were out to dinner, and she started talking about directors, and I was like, ‘Um, Kathryn, I think I’m gonna direct.’ She was, mercifully, so excited. And it really felt like a rocket launch in that moment.”

On “WandaVision,” Schaeffer knew the show would either be drawing from the visual tropes of family sitcoms, or it would exist “in Marvel world, and everyone knows what Marvel looks like.” By contrast, “Agatha All Along” exists largely inside a realm heretofore unseen in the MCU, which meant Schaeffer needed to conjure a brand new look for the show — while also honoring its finely calibrated tone blending horror, humor and fantasy.

“Obviously, it’s a horror show, but it’s not a terrifying show,” she says. “There are allusions to ‘Suspiria’ and ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘Poltergeist’ and that kind of thing, but it’s still a comedy and it’s still Marvel.” Instead, Schaeffer’s biggest inspiration was director George Miller’s 1987 horror comedy “The Witches of Eastwick,” which stars Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as three women who discover they’re also witches. 

“The witches always look big. The camera’s a little low, and they kind of loom,” she says. “There was this largeness that I was interested in getting, that both conveys a little bit of camp, and also the bigness of these women.”

“I Don’t Like Hiding Things From the Audience, Just to Then Be, Like, ‘Boo!’” 

In Episode 2 of “Agatha All Along,” Agatha discovers that she is incapable of learning Teen’s real identity. When he says his name, his mouth is covered by a swooping black line that looks similar to a signature; later, when he tells Agatha about where he’s from, his voice becomes inaudible.

“I don’t like hiding things from the audience, just to then be, like, ‘Boo!’” Schaeffer says. “There’s no artistry to that. So when we talked about obscuring who he is, the first question is, why? What is the utility of that? The answer is, it’s about the effect that his mystery has on Agatha. What does that do to her? How does it motivate her? How does it hit her emotionally?”

Suffice it to say, the mystery of who Teen really is has also captivated a large swath of the Marvel fandom, especially after one of the “Agatha All Along” trailers included the shot of Teen’s mouth getting obscured. Fans have already started to populate the internet with speculation, attempting to interpret the movement of Locke’s cheeks and chin to suss out Teen’s real name — a methodology that is only bound to increase with lip readers attempting to sort out what Locke is saying in the second scene.

When asked about whether this kind of speculation will bear any fruit, Schaeffer laughs. “This is what I would say: That’s not the first place I’d look,” she says. “It’s not entirely irrelevant: But there are other places to look.”

She is no stranger to rampant fan theorizing: By its final episodes, “WandaVision” spawned a small cottage industry of fevered conjecture about what surprises could be in store in the final episodes — pretty much all of which (Doctor Strange! Magneto! Mephisto!) wound up being wildly incorrect.

“It still stops my heart,” Schaeffer says. “My preoccupation is maximum viewer enjoyment, so I get nervous when people get ahead of it. I have to trust that humans are capable of deciding what kind of experience they want. But I comfort myself with the knowledge that it’s a circuitous path, and I hope that that path is enjoyable.”

She sighs. “It makes me a little heartsick when I catch reactions of people who were ultimately disappointed by things,” she says. “It gets to me a little bit. But in approaching ‘Agatha,’ it was not front of mind. I really can’t control that. That’s a level of fandom that is beyond my reach.”

“How Do I Direct Patti LuPone?!”

When it came to casting the show, one name in particular seemed completely out of reach: The multiple Tony-award winning Broadway diva extraordinaire, Patti LuPone. 

“Someone who had worked with her before was like, ‘Oh no, she’d do it,’” Schaeffer says. “We were like, ‘What?’ And then suddenly I was on a Zoom with her, and I was like, ‘This [character] is an ancient Sicilian witch.’ And she was like, ‘I am an ancient Sicilian witch.’ And I was like, ‘I believe you.’”

Once LuPone’s deal was done — Schaeffer still can’t quite believe it happened — she was faced with a daunting reality: “I said to my husband, ‘How do I direct Patti LuPone?!’ And he was like, ‘You don’t have to. That’s the point.’”

To Schaeffer’s delight, she found that LuPone loves direction: “She shows up and she’s like, ‘I am your tool. I am your vessel.’” But she also says that LuPone just as often helped to shape the show for the better. By example, she cites the climactic scene in Episode 2 when Agatha’s coven must sing the “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” in Agatha’s basement to conjure the titular realm.

“I had designed that sequence a year prior,” Schaeffer says. “I knew exactly how I wanted it to go. We get there, and Patti was like, ‘Well, there would be vulnerability, right? Because this is a big deal for them. They’re putting themselves out there.’ At first, I was like, ‘Well, no, because they’re all badasses, and they need to really sing out.’ Then I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s totally right.’ And that informed everyone. Everybody came to it with their own baggage.”

One moment in particular still takes Schaeffer’s breath away, when Ahn — whose character’s mother was a famous ’70s rock star who turned the ballad into a wildly popular pop hit — spontaneously shed a mascara-laden tear during her close-up performing the song.

“When that happened, we were all behind the monitor, and everybody gasped,” Schaeffer says. “Then we were like, ‘Wipe it away! Wipe it away, Ali!’ Because we had shot so much of her already that if we didn’t get her wiping it, the continuity would be all off. Not only did she wipe it away, but she did it with shame. It’s so beautiful.”