In just seven months, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrives, and based on the title alone it’s set to be one of Phase Four’s most pivotal installments. Loki may have introduced and established the idea of branched realities and alternate timelines, but the Sorcerer Supreme’s sequel is poised to drastically expand the scope and scale of the concept.
After all, Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff takes second billing behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s title hero, and now that the franchise’s most powerful superhero has embraced the Darkhold and tapped into the limitless potential of her abilities, she’s fully capable of moving through the multiverse at will. Based on WandaVision‘s post-credits scene, it’s going to send her on a mission to find a timeline where her children aren’t just real, but alive and well.
In a new interview, the Emmy nominee admitted that she found it difficult at first to get out of the WandaVision mindset and into the Doctor Strange one given that she jumped straight from one project into the other and they required entirely different performances, but it sounds as though the evolution of Scarlet Witch is set to continue.
I wrapped WandaVision on a Wednesday and flew to London on a Friday to continue playing this part. I could have used getting out of the mindset, though, because they were totally different utilizations of the character and people would have had more time to understand WandaVision had we not just wrapped. And so there’s just a lot of, ‘We covered this in WandaVision…’. It’s bigger than me, there’s lots of threads that are continuing on after me that I’m not aware of, and so it’s always about, ‘What can I get from this journey with this character that maybe I haven’t tapped into yet with her?’.
That’s where I keep approaching things from so that I feel like I have some sort of strap-hang, that I can know that there’s going to be growth of some kind, even though it all maybe looks the same to other people. There is that conscious decision to learn a new element of this woman, or even of myself as an actor, something that I want to explore that I can bring to it.”
That’s either very good or very bad news for Stephen Strange, depending on whether or not Wanda turns out to be the real villain of the piece as has been widely speculated. Everything we’ve been hearing about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness so far has painted it as a one-of-a-kind MCU blockbuster the likes of which we’ve never seen before, and March 2022 can’t come soon enough so that we can see just how Sam Raimi’s mystical movie plans to reinvent the rules of the shared saga once again.
