“WandaVision” showrunner Jac Schaeffer recently explained the return of Quicksilver in an interview with Marvel.com.
Quick recap
The latest “WandaVision” episode ended with Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) opening her door to see her silver-haired brother, Pietro, standing in the doorway. However, Pietro died in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” So that was a twist itself.
But then things got weird. Pietro — who is the superhero Quicksilver — did not look like he did in “Age of Ultron.” In that film, Aaron Taylor-Johnson played the character. This time, he was played by Evan Peters, who played Quicksilver in Fox’s X-Men franchise (he was named Peter in those films).
- This represented the first time someone from the X-Men franchise of films — produced by Fox — had joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which have been released by Disney. This is a big deal since Disney purchased 21st Century Fox and its film properties back in 2019, and people have been waiting for the X-Men to arrive, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
The ending, explained
Schaeffer told Marvel.com that bringing back Pietro — this time played by Peters — would be a weird move from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But, she said, it made sense given how weird “WandaVision” has been already.
- “We loved the idea of (bringing him back),” Schaeffer told Marvel.com. “And then we were like, how in the world are we going to make this make logical sense? Like, how do we justify this? Because that’s the thing, you can hatch a million great ideas, but to make them land, to make them be grounded, to make them feel organic to the larger story.”
- “This show is such a mind scramble, and because it’s working on so many levels, and there’s so many notions of what’s real and what’s not, and performance, and casting, and audience, and fandom, and all of that, we just thought it would be the biggest thrill to bring Evan over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
Schaffer said she needed to convince Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige that bringing back Quicksilver made sense before implementing it into the show.
- “Everybody was really excited. I think Kevin wanted to make sure that there was a reason for it, that it made sense. And I hope that’s what we did.”
What else is coming?
Schaffer told me in an interview for the Deseret News that there were plenty of ideas thrown around for the show, and more twists could be on the way.
- “Yeah, I mean there were definitely things that I liked. There wasn’t anything that I was like, ‘I’m gonna walk off this project because you won’t do this’ — like nothing was ever like that intense. There are certainly things that I wish we had tried, but I do think all of those things that fall into that category are things that fell by the wayside in an effort to strengthen a cohesive story. The series itself is such an enormous swing. So, whatever weirder (things) that I wanted to do — I think we sort of nailed it with being an odd duck.”