In ‘Agatha All Along,’ Kathryn Hahn plays a witch with vulnerability

The older Kathryn Hahn gets, the hungrier she is to tell complex and compelling stories about women. Fortunately, the rich and nuanced character she plays in the Disney Plus series “Agatha All Along” helped satiate that appetite.
“I think for so long, the women that we’ve been able to see character-wise on screens have been kind of smooshed, like they’ve become either the mother or their experience becomes tangential to the main story,” Hahn said in an interview.
Hahn’s Agatha was first introduced in “WandaVision,” where she masqueraded as nosy neighbour Agnes. She was spellbinding, earning an Emmy nomination for the role in 2021. In “Agatha All Along,” which debuts Wednesday, Agatha Harkness has escaped the town of Westview, N.J. She teams up with a teen (Joe Locke) and a coven of witches to face the trials of the legendary Witches’ Road and thereby get her power back.
 
Hahn, who’s 51, said Agatha is almost like a teenager who’s rebelling. “It’s kind of like the second adolescence of a person’s life. That’s what it feels like, what Agatha feels like.”
In the Marvel comics that inspired the series, Agatha never had her own stories. Jac Schaeffer, the showrunner of “WandaVision” and “Agatha All Along,” said the character didn’t come fully into being until Hahn was cast.
“When you have a performer like Kathryn, you can do anything,” Schaeffer said in a separate interview. “So that became the goal, like, how do we make this character worthy of a performer like Kathryn? This is her show; if it has her name on it, how do we make it worthwhile when Kathryn can do the full spectrum of performance? And that was the guiding light that was our north star.”
Hahn has always been a malleable actor, quietly moving between comedies and dramas without ever typecasting herself. She stood out in ensemble pieces like “Bad Moms” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” led with a soulful performance in “Tiny Beautiful Things” and starred in the heartbreaking “Private Life.”
In “Agatha All Along,” she offers more than just a witchy portrayal of the Marvel villain. In the smallest of moments, vulnerability reveals itself in her expressions, capturing the loss and heartache that Agatha has never been allowed to show.
“She’s a great performer,” Hahn said of the character. “She loves to put on a show, loves the costumes, loves the pretending … I think she likes the cat and mouse game, but all of that is at a deep, deep cost … she’s just been carrying something for a very long time. So I think losing her powers at the end of ‘WandaVision’ is that vulnerability underneath all of it.”
I asked if that hit home, and when has she felt the need to claim a sense of agency for herself and her career.
“There have been a couple times where it was very difficult for me, but I’ve had to make some calls that went against the grain,” she said. “Like where it wasn’t the thing that was going to make everybody happy, but I knew for my own self I needed to and that it was not something that really comes naturally to me my whole life. So that was like jumping off of a cliff … but I felt very proud afterwards, that it was like, ‘OK, this is me doing this for myself and for my family.’ I felt very, very powerful.”
It’s perhaps what makes Hahn the actor that she is. She’s the woman everyone wants to get to know, with an energy that’s palpable when one walks into the room. If you’re lucky, you get a warm hug after.
Hahn said she feels most at home when she’s acting, loving the moments between action and cut. “I feel the most weirdly free and able to tell the actual truth and especially when I’ve got a cast like this.”
Hahn complimented her co-star Locke, with whom she shares most of the scenes. In a separate interview, he talked about Hahn. “It was like the best teaching you could ever get. Agatha has this mentor-ish kind of personality and so that was sort of the vibe with me and Kathryn — she was the best teacher, in a way.”
Hahn said it felt like they were in a crazy sandbox, where they could do all of these different things, and “every one of these incredible cast members had a chance to shine like that.”
Hahn shares the screen with Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn and Debra Jo Rupp, who each play to their strengths in the ensemble piece. But it’s Hahn who simply casts a spell.
The first two episodes of “Agatha All Along” stream on Disney Plus beginning Sept. 18 at 9 p.m.