Agatha All Along Serves Up Magic, Premieres to Spellbinding Reviews

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The Agatha All Along cast walked the purple carpet for the show’s premiere. Joe Locke, who plays gay character ‘Teen,’ says of the LGBTQ+ representation on the show, “It’s not the driving force of the plot.”

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Related: Something Queer Comes Your Way with “Agatha All Along”

The WandaVision spinoff was touted as an LGBTQ+ paradise, highlighting the innate queerness, acceptance, and the parallels between witches and outcasts. It’s no surprise that a Variety correspondent asked the cast, creators, and producers a few questions about how “gay” and “diverse” the series would actually be.

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On the purple carpet, Ali Ahn, who plays Alice Wu-Gulliver in the series, was asked about diversity in the series–referring to people of color. She goes on to explain:

“What’s cool is that, the point of it [diversity] is not that actually. It’s just the world. It’s not like it’s a whole storyline. You know what I mean? It just is, and I think that’s how most of us experience it.”

 

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A little bit of a sensitive subject, but representation is truly important because, as an audience, you want to see yourself represented on screen. So when Joe Locke was asked about “Agatha All Along being the ‘gayest Marvel project to date'” and whether he agreed. He had this to say:

“I would say so, yeah. It’s got many layers. Definitely, gay is one of them.”

Related: Joe Locke Discusses Embracing Depth Beyond Just Being a Gay Character

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Joe is beloved for his character on Heartstopper where he plays a character who navigates young love as a gay teen. So Joe expounds on what it actually means to have queer characters on Agatha All Along in comparison to Heartstopper:

“That’s also one of the greatest things about the show [Agatha All Along]. In ‘Heartstopper,’ the queerness is the plot of the show. Whereas [with Agatha], Teen’s queerness…is not the driving force of the plot.”

The show’s casting director Sarah Halley Finn talked about Joe’s casting as ‘Teen’ and how they wanted to be as authentic to the source material as possible without having to outrightly ask teenagers to “come out” just to play this role:

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“We did want to cast that role authentically, and let’s also be honest, this is a character who is a teenager. So this is not a question we are going to ask teenagers to come out and have to answer. It was just more about ‘Here’s the character, we’re looking to cast it authentically, please submit an audition, and then we’re gonna take it from there.” She adds, “Joe did an incredible audition.” 

 

Kathryn Hahn, who plays titular character Agatha, shares the same sentiment when asked if the series might be the “gayest Marvel project to date”:

“What is the most exciting thing about it is that, that’s not exactly what it’s about. It’s so normalized. But yeah, definitely think it is [the ‘gayest Marvel project to date’]”

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What Agatha All Along brings to the table is the ability to include representation without using it as a driving force for creating a storyline, and that is exactly what happens in real life. We are all different, unique, and spell-binding–just like Agatha’s magic (darkness and mischief included).

Be sure to catch the series on Disney+ with new episodes every Wednesday. 

Source: Variety

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