WandaVision’s first and possibly only season has come to a close on Disney+, and we’re still working through all the Easter eggs and plot implications. One of the biggest moments of the series was when Wanda’s dead brother, Pietro, knocked on her door. Only it wasn’t Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who played the character in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Instead, it was–spoilers ahead–actor Evan Peters, who played the mutant version of the character in three of Fox’s X-Men movies. In a new interview by Variety with actress Elizabeth Olsen and head writer Jac Schaeffer, Schaeffer revealed just how surprised she was by the fan reaction to this moment.
“Naively, I didn’t expect people to get carried away in that way,” Schaeffer said about the whirlwind of fan theories that followed Peters’ appearance. “We didn’t anticipate that the show would drop after a full year of MCU drought in the middle of a pandemic.”
“I couldn’t have anticipated, I don’t know, maybe [WandaVision executive producer] Mary Livanos and [MCU mastermind] Kevin Feige are like, ‘Yeah, it’s like this every time,'” Schaeffer continued. “But I’m like, these theories are crazy! So it’s not that it wasn’t that it was not part of my thinking, and also, that’s not my department. I am lucky enough that I get to hear about the other projects and sometimes involved in their conversations. I know a little bit about all the things that Lizzie’s been up to.”
While the theorizing itself surprised Schaeffer, she knew that Peters’ role itself would be huge.
“It’s one of the few things in this series that I was like, yeah, I was expecting a really big reaction. Everything else, I’ve been floored by the enormity of the reactions, but that was just the thing that I’ve been sitting on for two years being like, ‘just wait, just wait!'”
While WandaVision has ended, the next MCU show is almost here; The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuts on Disney+ on March 19. Olsen’s next appearance in the MCU, which the end of WandaVision sets up, comes in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which is currently scheduled to hit theaters on March 25, 2022.
