Marvel’s first series for Disney+ is part drama, part homage to vintage sitcoms, following the misfit heroes played by Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany to some weird places.
NY TIMES: In the time they have spent playing Marvel heroes together, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany have gotten extremely comfortable with each other. Not even a little misdirected mucus during the making of their new Disney+ series, “WandaVision” — an incident they affectionately describe as “Snotgate” — flustered them for long.
It occurred when their characters — a woman enhanced with psychic powers named Wanda Maximoff (Olsen) and a synthetic android called Vision (Bettany) — shared a kiss in, especially cold weather. And some disagreements remain about the specifics of how it transpired.
“Paul was not in a good mood for me to make a joke about his snot,” Olsen said in a video interview with Bettany last month. “It was my first time ever seeing him get truly defensive about anything.”
Here, Bettany leaned into his camera and replied, sotto voce: “It was her snot. Anyway.”
They agreed that their differences were quickly settled, and now they can laugh about it. “It was over as quickly as it happened,” Bettany said.
Such are the perils of playing a troubled woman and a sophisticated robot who have fallen in love with each other — characters who first met in the 2015 Marvel blockbuster “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” returned for several sequels and now get the chance to carry their own television series when “WandaVision” makes its debut on Jan. 15.
Like its main characters, “WandaVision” is, well, weird. It’s not strictly an action-packed spectacle in the manner of hit movies like “Avengers: Endgame” — it’s a hybrid of drama and comedy that pays faithful homage to vintage sitcoms like “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Bewitched” and “Family Ties.”
Now, through circumstances beyond anyone’s control, “WandaVision” has to carry even more weight. When the pandemic prompted Marvel to reshuffle its release calendar, “WandaVision” became the studio’s first attempt to bring the superhero soap opera of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to an original Disney+ series, in hopes that it will do for its comic-book characters what “The Mandalorian” has done for “Star Wars,” another Disney-owned fantasy franchise.
These are unexpectedly high stakes but, like the love-struck misfits they play, the stars of “WandaVision” see them as reasons to be more understanding of each other, snot and all.
As Olsen explained: “It’s daunting to take these movie-theater characters and put them on a small screen. There’s a lot of firsts that are a little scary as an actor.”
Bettany agreed. “We need to feel safe with each other,” he added, “to do the thing we’re doing.”
Both actors entered the Marvel family in unusual ways. Bettany, a star of films like “A Beautiful Mind” and “Margin Call,” was cast in the first M.C.U. movie, “Iron Man,” to play the voice of Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence system, J.A.R.V.I.S.
“I would turn up for one day’s work and solve everyone’s problems,” Bettany said. “I could go, ‘The bad guys are coming, sir!’ And then they would give me a bag of money, and I would go home. It was lovely.”
Bettany was upgraded to an onscreen role for “Age of Ultron,” which also introduced Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) as Wanda. At that time, Olsen said: “I was getting typecast as emotionally struggling young women in small genre films. They were like, let’s put her in a bigger genre film and make her the mentally unhealthy struggling hero.”
Though the spotlight shone brighter on co-stars like Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., Bettany and Olsen bonded over the strangeness of their enterprise, like a behind-the-scenes debate they observed over whether Vision should have android genitalia. (Mercifully, the answer was no.)
As they went onto films like “Captain America: Civil War,” they found that they shared an appreciation for diligence and preparedness, even on a hectic Marvel set.
At one point on that film, Olsen said, “I asked Paul if he wanted to run lines with me for the next week. And he had his lines memorized for next week. I was like, this is going to be a great working relationship.”
But Vision was seemingly killed in “Avengers: Infinity War,” and the following year, “Endgame” concluded the narrative arcs of major heroes like Iron Man and Captain America.
Marvel was exploring storylines for its next wave of movies when Disney introduced its Disney+ streaming service, with the expectation that Marvel would also provide original content for it.
Kevin Feige, the Marvel Studios president, said that a Disney+ series offered the opportunity to flesh out the relationship between Wanda and Vision that had been only hinted at in the movies.
