The stars of Agatha All Along joined fans in the Dolby Theater last Saturday night for a PaleyFest 2025 panel where secrets were spilled, and fan theories were confirmed! Showrunner Jac Schaeffer appeared alongside Kathryn Hahn, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp to talk all things Agatha. Kicking off with a screening of episode 3, “Through Many Miles / Of Tricks and Trials”, the following panel was a highlight of PaleyFest 2025.
[Editor’s note: quotes have been edited slightly for clarity.]
Agatha, Billy, and Wanda
Jac Schaeffer and Kathryn Hahn dug into what it meant to create an Agatha Harkness series, from the initial pitch to the purpose of diving deeper into Agatha’s character. Schaeffer noted that she pitched several different shows to Marvel Studios, with each involving Agatha and Westview in some way.
Schaeffer remarked, “Well, after WandaVision, I was invited by Marvel to come back and develop something. So I had sort of an incubation period where it was sort of like, “Is it this character? Is this character?” and every single character that I set on a journey, it would be like, ‘and in episode three, Agatha Harkness shows up’ or ‘Oops, they’re in Westview, and who’s there?’ So at a certain point, Kevin Feige was like, ‘Do we just make the show about that?’”
When asked about getting the call to return, Kathryn Hahn responded: “I mean, it was so unexpected and unbelievable. I had so much fun as Agatha. And the fact that Jac was interested in doing a really deep dive into her was so thrilling. I trust anything that this woman writes, so I knew that it was going to be so… what I didn’t expect is that it was surprising in an entirely different way than WandaVision.”
Agatha’s character developed quite a bit throughout the series, but something many fans appreciated is that she wasn’t redeemed. Agatha is a terrible person and learning what happened to her son doesn’t change that fact, but it does add more depth to a villain who didn’t get much backstory in WandaVision. It was fascinating to hear how Schaeffer and Hahn see the character because so much of their intention is very clear on screen, from Agatha’s mentorship to her relationship with Billy and Wanda.
Kathryn Hahn explained her understanding of Agatha: “It was really following the road map of the scripts, but every episode kind of felt like getting into the tar of what she had been carrying and why all of that confidence and sass and meanness is on top of it was really… it definitely was getting deeper and deeper towards the last episode, where you see what’s underneath it for her. It’s interesting because that last episode kills me and I think when you see them, when Agatha’s a witch, and you see Wiccan and Agatha, there is an acceptance, maybe, through just accepting him, maybe the shame is kind of left a little bit. That’s where I feel like we’re landing, is in a place of next steps, which I don’t think she’d really seen for herself. I think she was gonna be caught in this, just wanting power, wanting power, which, of course, she still does.”
Further expanding on Agatha’s relationship with Wiccan, Hahn continued, “It was so calibrated that she was really wondering for a lot of those first episodes that wondered if he could be, you know, and even if she didn’t know, there was like this unconscious maternal lie that she certainly didn’t love.” The panel moderator summed their relationship up perfectly by pointing out: “It’s like dads and the dog they say they didn’t want”.
Jac Schaeffer also provided some excellent insight on Agatha’s weirdly wonderful relationship with Wanda: “Well, so off of WandaVision, one of the things that Kathryn brought to the role in the development of Agatha was, Kathryn really looked into that what Agatha wanted from Wanda was connection. She was like, ‘I’ll be whatever you want, girl. I’ll braid your hair, I’ll be your mentor, we can hang, we can fight like, whatever. Let’s do a thing.’ And Wanda was not interested! Wanda was on her own journey. So, what we wanted to do for Agatha in her own show – I feel deeply that Agatha is at her best as a mentor. She mentors all the other witches. She guides them and teaches them. One of my favorite moments is in episode three that you saw with Jen, like she can’t help but teach, she’s a natural teacher, even though she hates it. So we wanted to have the central relationship be an opportunity for her to be a mentor. And it was Mary Livanos’ idea. I had an idea of a goth teen, and it was Mary Livanos who was like, ‘Obviously, it’s Billy.’ And also, we kind of got a perverse thrill out of the idea that Agatha ended up being more of a guide to Billy than Wanda.’
Creating Agatha All Along
Jac Schaeffer shed a lot of light on the unique first episode of the series, in which Agatha finds herself the star of her own crime drama thanks to Wanda’s lingering spell. The episode is a true transitional moment between the TV-influenced WandaVision and the witchy, horror-influenced Agatha All Along.
Speaking about the differences, Schaeffer said: “I think with WandaVision and with Agatha, it was about the women in question. WandaVision is about Wanda, and sitcoms are at the heart of who Wanda is. It’s how she learned English and her idealized sense of family and her life, all of that was intertwined, that’s her psyche. So in looking at an Agatha show, I wanted to do that again. And that’s actually part of where the idea of the prestige crime show at the top [comes from] because the question was, if Agatha was gonna have her own [show], what would it be, and it was like, ‘A murder show!’ Clearly, she would get down with a murder show. That was the guiding principle. Everything about the show needed to compliment the woman herself.”
Kathryn Hahn elaborated, “It was actually really important for Jac and I to be as kind of serious about it as we possibly could. We took the accent very seriously. We took the haunting of whatever happened to her child and that bedroom very seriously. We took it as very, very serious business. I think that’s why, when the holes, when the bubble of the spell of Wanda starts getting punctured. When all of a sudden reality starts to seep in. That’s why I think the breaking of the spell at the end of the episode is so fascinating and such a slow, interesting burn when all of a sudden the light starts to pour in, and she starts to kind of see all the clues start to come together.”
A really interesting aspect of the series that Schaeffer touched on was the idea that Agatha All Along is a spell. The show is designed to cast a spell over the audience and the coven, from the “Witches’ Road” song itself to the practical sets and the final twist. That’s seen very clearly in The Ballad of the Witches’ Road, which Schaeffer explained to the audience.
“The earliest kernel for the design of the show was my hope and my mantra to the writers, that the show is a spell, that we wanted the show itself to be a spell, to cast a spell on the audience. And as we were sort of trying to figure out how to accomplish that, we were talking about, ‘We need to bring a song into it’, because of the bop that was “Agatha All Along”. Twin goals of ‘The show is a spell. We need a bop. The show is a spell. We need a bop.’ And then we were like, ‘Well, music is a spell. A song is a spell.’ And we just kept unpacking that, until it became that not only is the song itself a spell, but it actually is the con of the show, and it is also the main character’s deep emotional truth. So then I went to [Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Bobby Lopez] and was like, ‘Hey, so I need you to write a song that is all of these things and also handles this enormous burden of plot’, and they wrote lyrics, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s not good enough.’ We did have to note the lyrics really meticulously because it was all tied to the plot and to how we were defining witchcraft and the rules of the world. I mean, it was a mind scramble, and they are the perfect partners for that.”
Jac Schaeffer fully expected viewers to figure out the big twist of the series earlier than they did, noting that fans were watching the little details so closely they missed the bigger picture: “ I did think people were – sorry, spoiler – gonna figure out that Billy made the Road earlier. There were people and there were little Tweets here and there, but people were distracted by Mephisto, and they were distracted by Ralph Bohner and – [audience laughs] You’re welcome. It worked out that there were other things. I think it was because there was such close viewership that people weren’t seeing the bigger picture. And then it was after [episode] six that that started to kind of percolate in a real way. Megan McDonnell, who’s the consulting producer on the show, she has really great instincts about what the audience should think and feel when. So I would text her, like, ‘Are we on track? Is this right?’ and she’s like, ‘It’s perfect! It’s perfect.’”
Jennifer Kale, Alice Wu-Gulliver, and Sharon Davis (Mrs. Hart)
All of the characters in the coven were touched on, from Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale to Ali Ahn’s Alice Wu-Gulliver and her connection to music.
Speaking about Alice, Ahn talked about how she connected with Alice’s intergenerational trauma and how tragic her story was because of the “regret over potential that was never realized”. She said, “But also that’s life, you know, it’s not a fairy tale sometimes. I think it shows so much discipline on Jac’s part too, you fall in love with the hero arc. And the moment of that anger, of like, ‘I just got here. I finally figured it out.’ But the thing that Rio says to her about ‘You died doing what you’re supposed to do’, I think Alice can’t argue with that. It came too soon. Sometimes life is shorter than we want it to be, but I think she recognizes [that], even if she’s not happy about it. She just made friends! I don’t think Alice has ever had friends. I think she understands the justice of it, like, ‘If you’re gonna go out, at least go out doing what you’re supposed to.’”
The best running gag throughout the panel was Debra Jo Rupp’s anger at being left out of the party. She was jokingly upset about Sharon’s fate, and it led to some hilarious moments in the Dolby Theater! Speaking about the formation of the coven, Jac Schaeffer said:
“Talking about Debra Jo for a second, it was an early idea that we would bring a citizen of Westview on the Witches’ Road. And it was abundantly clear [that it would be] Mrs. Hart.” Rupp had a slightly different story, saying: “Now, the phone call I got was, ‘We’d love you to join this project. You’re gonna be a witch.’ And I was so excited! I get there, I think I’m gonna be a witch. Debra Jo is gonna play a witch. And I get there and no one is really looking me in the eye. And it just went downhill from there.”
Speaking about her role more seriously, she elaborated with “I loved every minute of this so much. I mean, at my age, you sometimes don’t get to do new, exciting things. And this came my way. It was such a gift. And with these people, these amazing people, I ate so many peanut butter sandwiches, sitting there eating with the prosthetics, and just trying to be lovely about it. And Jac, if you ever can work with Jac, it is the luckiest day of your life. She was this beautiful leader. Nothing phased her, and she just was like – when you were so tired you wanted to die, she was like ‘Chop chop! Chop chop!’ and you got up and you went. It was just lovely.”
Finally, speaking on her fate, Rupp said, “Well, I was not happy. I was not happy. I would see Jac every once in a while, and then finally she would look at me, and I […] ‘But this isn’t, she comes back like in a field or something, right? This is Marvel!’ She would just say, ‘Oh, Debra Jo…’”
Schaeffer did give Sharon fans the tiniest scrap of hope, saying “No [comment]. In this corner of the MCU, you know, things are not linear. There can always be…” Unfortunately, the last bit of what she said was drowned out by the audience applauding, but we get the idea. Sharon may live!
Nicholas Scratch & Agatha All Along Season 2
The biggest moment of the night was Jac Schaeffer confirming a persistent fan theory: namely, that Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal / Death is the “father” of Agatha’s son, Nicholas Scratch! Many fans noticed the similarity in appearance between Plaza and Scratch actor Abel Lysenko, which Schaffer specifically called out at the PaleyFest panel.
Ali Ahn kicked off the conversation about favorite fan theories by saying, “A lot of people think Rio is Nicholas’s father,” which got the entire auditorium erupting in cheers. Schaeffer explained, “When we were developing [Agatha All Along], Mary Livanos and I, we got a lot of questions, like ‘Who’s the dad, who’s the dad?’ and we were like, ‘Why do you wanna know?’. When we were casting Nicky, we were like, ‘That kid looks like Aubrey’. Anyway, that was just something we didn’t want to answer the hows and whys of it, because witches. But it was something that was important to the writers, to me, and just something special. So it was really lovely that the fans said and that we can confirm.”
The amount of cheering that followed this statement was well-deserved. Being in the audience when this theory was confirmed was something I’ll definitely remember because you could just feel the passion and excitement radiating not only from the fans in the audience but also everyone on stage!
Fans screamed out at the end of the panel for any news at all surrounding Agatha All Along Season 2, but unfortunately, we didn’t get the answer we were hoping for. Kathryn Hahn responded, “We don’t have Patti LuPone here!”, which Schaeffer backed up by saying “Patti LuPone has the answer.” That was definitely in reference to LuPone’s recent statements wherein she said Jac Schaeffer discounted the idea of a second season while filming Agatha All Along, going as far as saying Marvel asked Schaeffer to develop a second season of WandaVision, which she declined since she prefers to make limited series. That news struck every Wanda fan around the world straight in the heart – it may be too late for more WandaVision, but we can hope Schaeffer comes around on a second season for Agatha.
What do you think about these quotes and reveals at PaleyFest 2025? Let us know on social media @mycosmiccircus or @TheCosmicCircus.com on Bluesky!
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