But since 2013 she has been best known as a member of the Marvel family, playing Wanda Maximoff — aka Scarlet Witch, a Sokovian mutant with the power of chaos magic — on the big screen, with limited screen time, in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, and then this year on the small screen in the limited series WandaVision, Disney+’s first MCU TV series and the first series in phase four of the MCU, for which she has garnered rave reviews and Emmy buzz.
Highlights — lightly edited for clarity/brevity — appear lower on the page.Past guests include Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Eddie Murphy, Gal Gadot, Warren Beatty, Jennifer Lawrence, Snoop Dogg, Julia Roberts, Stephen Colbert, Reese Witherspoon, Aaron Sorkin, Margot Robbie, Ryan Reynolds, Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Matthew McConaughey, Kate Winslet, Jimmy Kimmel, Natalie Portman, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Judi Dench, Quincy Jones, Jane Fonda, Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Justin Timberlake, Elisabeth Moss, RuPaul, Cate Blanchett, Jimmy Fallon, Renee Zellweger, Michael Moore, Emilia Clarke, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Helen Mirren, Tyler Perry, Sally Field, Spike Lee, Lady Gaga, J.J.
Through the college I ended up going to, NYU, I got to work with the Atlantic Theater Company, and because of them I met my agent, started understudying, and then Martha Marcy May Marlene, my first film, happened while I was still in college.
I auditioned for like the assistant to the casting director in a small room in New York with just a camera on me and them reading the script.
I just remember it was winter in L.A., and I had my first panic attack in a restaurant, and I thought I was having like a blood sugar fainting thing, because I’m not like an anxiety person — or I wasn’t.
I mean, at that moment anytime someone said, “Your life’s about to change,” I was like, “Well, it’s not, I’m still living in a 400-square foot apartment and my stuff is in boxes because they don’t have enough space.” But I do think that has to be somehow part of it.
Well, I genuinely loved school — I love being a student — but I think the driving force was anyone who would be like, “Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t finish,” or whatever.
What I did know is I like blockbuster movies as well, but I was not being considered for them.
It really has benefited me because they continue to use me not because they have to, but because they think there’s story that can be used, and so even though I’ve had my own scheduling conflicts that have broken my heart in certain moments, I have always felt like they had a plan for me.
I had moved from New York to LA and had been going through a big transition, and it was the first time something was sent to me, and they said, “Does she want to come on early and become a producer on it?” I had never had that experience and I was interested in what that meant.
It was pitched to me in-between Infinity War and Endgame.
And then this other crazy pressure of like, “What the hell did we just film?” We filmed something crazy, so you either were going to be with us or not with us.
I had been talking about how I wanted to do comedy for a long time, and I would even have generals with people about comedies, and no one thought I was funny.
Pre WandaVision you once said, “Everything that Wanda had gone through in the MCU had happened to her, and she almost didn’t have any agency.” WandaVision feels different.
We’ve watched her for such a long time wrestle with this idea of should she or shouldn’t she be a superhero? What does it mean to her and everyone around her? She’s lost because of it.
When I first realized it had big numbers? Disney+ had projected a certain amount of millions of viewers they were hoping to have by a certain time, and it was like 100 million more or something crazy like that.