Over the course of her singularly unpredictable three-decade career, Kathryn Hahn has brought her signature wit to a plethora of genres: crime procedurals (“Crossing Jordan”), horror (“The Visit”), ensemble comedies (“Step Brothers,” “Bad Moms”) and existential dramedies (“Tiny Beautiful Things,” “Mrs. Fletcher”).
But in the Disney+ series “Agatha All Along,” Hahn pulls from all the disparate strands of her body of work to play the perfidious, power-hungry witch Agatha Harkness. It’s a role that finds Hahn — lately known for portraying messy antiheroines — at the height of her powers.
“By the end of the show, I would go into hair and makeup at the end of the day and be like, ‘Well, this is my last acting job,’ because I felt like I had a chance to do it all. But it really just reopened my hunger and love for performing,” Hahn says in a recent interview. “I do feel like this is exactly the part I’m supposed to play at this period of my life.”
Though she had watched live-action Marvel movies with her two children and voiced Doc Ock in “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse,” Hahn never expected to join the MCU full-time. But in 2019, soon after a general meeting with Marvel executives, Hahn was pitched the high-concept limited series “WandaVision,” predecessor to “Agatha All Along.” In “WandaVision,” she would play Agatha, the nosy neighbor of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany). Agatha, it is eventually revealed, has a secret identity.
“WandaVision” creator Jac Schaeffer’s desire to pay homage to classic sitcoms in a meditation on grief intrigued Hahn, who recognized parts of her scrappy, naturally performative younger self in Agatha. And who wouldn’t want to play a shape-shifting, centuries-old witch?
Much like her character, Hahn has grown into her power over time. In her 20s and early 30s, Hahn recalls being told that the roles she was being offered would gradually dwindle — if not by the time she became a mother, then by the time she reached middle age. That attitude toward female performers has begun to shift in recent years, with Hahn joining a growing number of women who are now producing and starring in their own projects.
“I feel like the work that I’ve been able to do post having children and post my 40s has been the most fulfilling since I was doing theater back in the day. I’ve felt the most relaxed and excited and not so fearful of doing something wrong but being really confident in the choices I’m making,” says Hahn, who believes women’s lives actually get richer with age. “I think the audience wants to see juicy, complicated, not-young women all the time — no offense to the amazing young women in our business.”
In the summer of 2021, a few months after “WandaVision” premiered to acclaim, Hahn learned that Schaeffer was developing a continuation of Agatha’s story. In their earliest conversations, Hahn and Schaeffer knew they wanted to maintain the character’s “acerbic, sarcastic, self-involved” demeanor while placing her in a position where she begrudgingly needs to form a coven to travel the fabled “Witches’ Road” and reclaim the power that Wanda had stripped of her at the end of “WandaVision.”
In the process, “Agatha” serves as an origin story of sorts for the wicked witch. The show reveals that Agatha’s nihilistic malevolence stems from her tortured relationship with her mother, who told her she was inherently and irredeemably evil and tried to kill her with her own coven. She also feels tremendous shame and guilt over being unable to save her son, Nicky, whose life she had attempted to extend by killing other witches. A master of communicating inner turmoil with a single freighted look, Hahn is able to offer gripping, albeit fleeting, windows into Agatha’s vulnerability.
Recently persuaded by her teen daughter, Mae, to join social media, Hahn abstains from reading the comments. So, apart from the posts she is sent or finds on her timeline, she is “blessedly” unaware of how fans have reacted. “But I do know how proud we are of it and how subversive and radical it felt to have an ending, especially a big Marvel show, be that small and tender and have this little beating heart,” she says.
Speaking again by phone a few days after the “Agatha” finale — which ends with Agatha sacrificing her life and agreeing to act as a kind of spiritual guide to Wanda’s son, Billy a.k.a. Wiccan (Joe Locke), as he searches for his missing twin brother — Hahn insists that she has yet to have any conversations about her future in the MCU.
“Even though obviously now Billy/Wiccan is not her son, there is some sort of hope for her that she’s able to maybe do for him what she couldn’t do for Nicky. I think they do make a great team. Of course, I love this part and I love Joe Locke madly, and we’ll see what the future holds,” Hahn says. “In my mind, this was a beautiful and satisfying way to say goodbye to this incredible character I had to play.”
