W MAGAZINE: For W’s second annual TV Portfolio, we asked 26 of the most sought-after names in television to pay homage to their favorite small-screen characters by stepping into their shoes.
WandaVision was the first television show produced by Marvel Studios, and any gamble Disney+ took to make the series happen immediately paid off. At one point during its nine-episode run, WandaVision was the most popular streamed show in the world (beaten only recently by another Marvel series, Loki). The suburbia-set series received critical acclaim, snagging 23 Emmy nominations—one of those for Elizabeth Olsen, who was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her performance as the titular Wanda—and convinced even the biggest Marvel skeptics to buy into its delicious plot.
It might come as a surprise, then, that Olsen doesn’t really watch that much contemporary television herself. But who could blame the actress, when most of her time is spent filming scenes for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Wanda Maximoff (also known as the Scarlet Witch), a wielder of chaos magic who materializes in the small town of Westview—first as a 1950s-era housewife married to a humanlike robot named Vision (played by Paul Bettany), then as a ’60s housewife, then a ’70s housewife, and so on. When the actress does watch television, though, she prefers to get into some of those older shows, like Murder, She Wrote, which she chose to re-create above, and, of course, episodes of ’90s sitcoms like Full House, of which there was no dearth in the actress’s childhood.
How did WandaVision come to you? You had already played the character Wanda Maximoff in the Avengers films, but WandaVision was a whole other ball game.
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