VULTURE: Everyone is obsessed with WandaVision, including, apparently, Jimmy Fallon. He’s so obsessed that he even imagined himself inside the TV show about a grieving Marvel superhero who imagines herself inside other TV shows. Kids, feel free to use this sentence in English class when your teacher asks you to explain what “meta” means.
In a new sketch called “FallonVision,” debuting right here on Vulture ahead of its broadcast on Fallon’s late-night show tonight, the host hops through time and several iterations of The Tonight Show. Elizabeth Olsen, the star of WandaVision and a guest on The Tonight Show this evening, is present throughout the whole journey in the role of the actress-guest who always behaves decade-appropriately. “Water?” she quips in the 1950s, before taking a sip and adding, “Well, that’s an odd way to pronounce ‘rum punch.’” In the ’70s, she smokes a cigarette (not necessarily of the nicotine variety) on live TV.
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Just like on the Disney+ series, it eventually becomes clear that Fallon is beaming himself through classic television as a way to escape his grief about what’s happening in real life in 2021. There’s also a twist at the end that suggests another WandaVision character may be the one responsible for all this. [Wink.]
Director Chris Tartaro, who has filmed and edited many prerecorded sketches for Fallon during his tenures on both Late Night and The Tonight Show, jumped on the phone less than an hour after capturing the sketch’s last shot to explain how it all came together. Watch the sketch first, because spoilers are below.
After the idea was conceived and fine-tuned by Fallon and his writers’ room, the first step was to confirm that Olsen, already booked as a Wednesday guest, was game to participate in the homage. She was, though she had to improvise a bit when wigs and other props couldn’t be shipped to her quickly enough. (Olsen is currently in London shooting Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.) “She took her Sunday to do this with her team, and they didn’t have costumes, and they just used what they had,” Tartaro says. (Feel free to closely examine every item Olsen wears in the sketch for possible clues about the Doctor Strange movie.)
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The hair and makeup heads break down how they brought the sitcom world of Wanda and Vision to life.
Rewatching old episodes of these classics was part of the preparation process, and Olsen told ELLE.com she did this to “understand the tones of each era.” The creative teams also needed a firm grasp of specific cultural moments (many of which were dictated by the producers and directors) and drew on personal experiences for additional research. “I used to watch a lot of these shows with my mom after school so I felt like I knew them; they were a comfort to me,” WandaVision makeup department head Tricia Sawyer tells ELLE.com. The pleasure derived from a family comedy is akin to a warm hug, which helps explain Wanda’s choice of genre for this fantasy world.
Talking from London (where they are currently shooting another Marvel project), Sawyer and hair department head Karen Bartek recount WandaVision’s fast-paced production and their role “overseeing the look of all of the actors and keeping it in the continuity of the Marvel Universe,” says Sawyer. Neither are strangers to the superhero world or Wanda Maximoff, having both worked on Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame (Bartek was also a hairstylist on Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel). However, WandaVision is unlike any previous MCU project and worked on a shooting schedule that felt “like a tiny movie shot in one day,” Bartek adds. The pair discuss techniques used for different decades, working with Elizabeth Olsen, and spill behind-the-scenes secrets—but their lips are sealed about the final two episodes.
WE GOT THIS COVERED: Within the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Wanda Maximoff has had a tough time of things, to put it lightly. Orphaned as a child and experimented on by HYDRA, she then lost her brother in the Battle of Sokovia, fell in love with a synthezoid before watching him die twice, and now finds herself being manipulated by a witch in the fictional reality she created for herself to escape all of this trauma.
That’s not exactly the stuff of sunshine and rainbows, with WandaVision showing just how far she’s come in terms of mastering her abilities. Kevin Feige didn’t publicly name her as the most powerful superhero in the entire franchise for no reason, and when Disney Plus’ smash hit series concludes in a couple of weeks, it won’t be long until we see Scarlet Witch again.
Elizabeth Olsen takes second billing behind the title hero in Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and we should have a much better indication of how she factors into the story of the Sorcerer Supreme’s sequel once WandaVision draws to a close. In fact, insider Daniel Richtman claims that Scarlet Witch will become the main focus on the entirety of Phase Four moving forward, but the tipster doesn’t offer any further details.
Of course, you could quite easily have reached that conclusion by yourself having watched WandaVision, seeing as she’s already inadvertently given Monica Rambeau superpowers that will directly inform Captain Marvel 2, while the manipulation of reality also plays a major part in Spider-Man 3, and it can’t be ruled out she’ll have some sort of role in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, either, given the weird stuff we’ve seen happen in the Quantum Realm before. And that’s just the tip of the Phase Four iceberg.
Marvel Cinema Universe Projects > WandaVision (2021) > Season 1 > Episode Stills > 1.08 “Previously On” Stills
Marvel Cinema Universe Projects > WandaVision (2021) > Season 1 > Screencaptures > 1.08 “Previously On” Screencaps
