“Agatha All Along” star Aubrey Plaza channeled 'chaotic energy' for Rio Vidal: 'There's all kinds of layers'
The actress also says there's "a similar quality" between Rio and her former Marvel character on FX's "Legion."
Warning: This article contains spoilers from Agatha All Along episodes 1 and 2.
Aubrey Plaza knows how to make an entrance, and in the case of her grand arrival on Marvel series Agatha All Along, she literally blows the door off its hinges.
The actress reunites with her Parks and Recreation colleague Kathryn Hahn (though the pair rarely shared a scene together on the NBC sitcom) for the WandaVision sequel, which drops its first two episodes today on Disney+. "I can't say everything about my character now, but I'll say that there's all kinds of layers," Plaza teases to Entertainment Weekly of her character Rio Vidal, a "green witch" who clearly has history with Hahn's Agatha Harkness. "I really wanted to try to bring some kind of chaotic energy and a spontaneity to it that would keep Agatha on her toes, and just have fun playing in that dynamic."
Mission accomplished. Plaza's Rio presents herself to Agatha when her old enemy is still trapped within the reality-distortion spell Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff cast during the events of WandaVision. Agatha is living out a false reality with a fake cop TV show called Agnes of Westview, named after the Agnes persona Agatha adopted to infiltrate Wanda's life. Rio uses her own guise of Federal Agent Vidal to get close to Agatha in order to break the hex. Once Agatha snaps back to reality and realizes she's been hexed for the past three years, the real Rio attacks.
Courtesy of Marvel Television
Aubrey Plaza as Rio Vidal in Marvel's 'Agatha All Along'Related: How Agatha All Along channels the history of iconic pop culture witches
Armed with a blade and the power to conjure winds strong enough to toss Agatha around her home, Rio clearly has unfinished business to resolve. While she can't outright kill Agatha, presumably because of some witchy rule (Agatha remarks how witch-on-witch murder is "not allowed"), Rio is determined to make her suffer for unspecified past crimes. However, after trashing the house, she resolves to sit back and watch entities known as the Salem Seven hunt her down.
"She scared me," Patti LuPone, who plays divination witch Lilia Calderu, confesses of Plaza's performance. "She did something in our first day of shooting together that opened up another aspect of Lilia."
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Agatha is able to escape Rio's wrath and the Salem Seven for the time being by assembling a coven of coven-less witches and entering the Witches' Road, a realm of existence that will test the enchantresses with fatal trials but will grant the victors their hearts' desires. It's fair to say, however, that Rio will be back in the game soon enough.
Courtesy of Marvel Television
Aubrey Plaza's Rio Vidal in 'Agatha All Along'Related: How Marvel expands 'the WandaVision corner' of the MCU with Agatha All Along and Vision Quest
Plaza speaks of the role in the same vein as her previous Marvel character, Lenny Busker of FX's X-Men-inspired drama Legion. Lenny was similarly a chaotic force, first arriving as a friend of powerful psychic David Haller (Dan Stevens) in a psychiatric hospital.
"I think there's a similar quality in the characters in that there's shapeshifting, a keep-you-guessing kind of quality with both of them," Plaza says. "But as you watch [Agatha All Along], it'll become clear that there's a very different journey that the characters are going on. I felt Legion was a lot about my powers being stripped away and it was a very male-dominated world, and then this show is very female dominated and very much about getting your power back."
"This is the first time I really worked with her," Hahn says of Plaza in a separate conversation with EW. "We didn't know each other's processes. I just admire her so much as a performer, and I was so excited that she was playing this part. Weirdly, once we got together to start shooting, our conversations stopped. We gave each other a lot of space. It's not like we ignored each other. We talked, but we never talked about [performance]. So when we got on stage together, there was definitely a feeling of on your heels, I don't know what's going to come at me, which was really exciting."
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
