Agatha All Along star Kathryn Hahn bares all in the opening scenes of her new WandaVision spin-off series – and she’s shared an insight into how Marvel’s first female bare bum shot came about.
The 51-year-old stars as the witch Agatha Harkness in the new Disney Plus show. At the end of WandaVision, Agatha is trapped in containment, but in the opening of the first episode, she wakes up back in the suburb where most of the original series took place.
She wanders out into the streets looking for answers about what’s going on – naked.
“I thought it was good to see her as stripped down, literally, as we possibly could, which spoke into her powerlessness at the present moment,” Hahn told Variety.
“[Agatha has] been stripped of all of her power at this point in the series. I mean, she really had nothing at that point, and so it became about illustrating that gap between that moment and her finding her power again.”
Showrunner Jac Schaeffer also added details about how the Emmy-nominated star came up with the idea for the nude shot.
“In the script, the idea was that she would emerge from the spell naked because that’s very witchy, and she’s taken all of her sort of performative selves off, and we’re getting down to the real Agatha,” Schaeffer told TV Line.
“But in the [original script], she realises where she is, and then she grabs a robe and goes outside. And Kathryn came to me, and she was like, ‘would Agatha stop to get a robe? I feel like she would go out there naked’.
“And Kathryn was so up for it, so I took it to Kevin [Feige, the president of Marvel Studios], and [the reaction] was mostly, ‘really?!’.”
The nine-episode series is the first Marvel has released since Echo in January and early reactions to the first four episodes are glowingly positive, with it being called “perfect” and “spellbinding”.
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The title of the show comes after several name changes, with previous titles including House of Harkness, Darkhold Diaries and Coven of Chaos. It had been suggested that the title confusion was intentional, as confirmed by the tongue-in-cheek final title, according to a report by Variety months before the confirmation.