Billy Maximoff Returns: Joe Locke and ‘Agatha All Along’ Creator on Hiding His Identity, ‘Wacky’ Fan Theories and Bringing Back [SPOILER] From ‘WandaVision’
SPOILER WARNING: This story includes major plot developments in Episode 6 of “Agatha All Along,” currently streaming on Disney+.
“It still feels like I’m breaking all the rules, but in a really good way,” Joe Locke says with a brilliantly broad smile. He’s talking with Variety the morning after the debut of Episode 6 of “Agatha All Along,” which finally revealed the backstory of his character: William Kaplan, a.k.a. Billy Maximoff, a.k.a. one of the sons of the Scarlet Witch. For the first time since he landed the role nearly two years ago, Locke is able to speak freely about (almost) every aspect of the character.
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“I’m so happy for Joe,” says “Agatha All Along” creator and showrunner Jac Schaeffer. “He has navigated the secrecy part of it so well, so elegantly, I am relieved that he can finally speak to the work that he’s put into this character and the arc of the show.”
It hasn’t been easy to keep these secrets. Practically from the moment news first broke that Locke, star of Netflix’s hit series “Heartstopper,” would star opposite Kathryn Hahn’s nefarious witch Agatha Harkness, Marvel fans have speculated that Locke was playing Billy Maximoff — who in the comics adopts the superhero handle Wiccan. But rather than confirm those suspicions, Schaeffer put the identity of Locke’s character, in the show’s parlance, under a sigil, a spell that masked his identity not only from the other characters, but from the audience as well. That all changed at the end of Episode 5, when the show revealed Teen was, in fact, Billy.
“After the 10th time someone’s like, ‘You’re playing Billy Maximoff,’ and I’m like, ‘Whaaat? No!’ — it gets easier,” Locke says with a laugh. “But I saw loads of comments last week being like, ‘Worst kept secret ever. We all knew!’ It’s like, yeah, but I couldn’t fucking say anything, could I? I still had to keep the secret!”
Episode 6, entitled “Familiar By Thy Side,” reveals the full story of how Billy came to join Agatha and the rest of their ad hoc coven on the Witches’ Road. The episode opens three years earlier, as a 13-year-old kid from Eastview, N.J. named William Kaplan (Locke) celebrates his bar mitzvah, on the same day that Wanda Maximoff collapsed her spell controlling the nearby town of Westview at the end of 2021’s “WandaVision.”
As William is driven home by his adoring parents Rebecca (Maria Dizzia) and Jeff (Paul Adelstein), an oncoming car forces them off the road, and they slam against a tree, right where William was sitting. As his parents scramble to get help, William’s heart stops beating at the same moment that Wanda’s collapsed spell erases her twin sons Billy and Tommy from existence. Suddenly, William’s eyes burst open, as he screams out, “Tommy!”
Put simply: After William dies, Billy’s soul takes over his body. But when he awakes, Billy cannot remember anything before the accident other than Tommy’s name. He knows only that he’s different, magical, able to hear other people’s thoughts. He just doesn’t know why or how.
Three years later, we see Billy sharing his ongoing investigation into his origins with his boyfriend, Eddie (Miles Gutierrez-Riley). After Billy arranges to meet with former Westview resident Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters) — i.e. Wanda’s fake brother from “WandaVision” — he learns for the first time about Wanda’s twin sons and what happened to them, as well as a dangerous witch named Agatha Harkness. Some further internet sleuthing brings Billy to Agatha’s doorstep, where the show recreates the events from the first episode from Billy’s point of view.
It turns out that Locke knew most of these details about Billy even before he got the role: Almost all of his audition scenes came from “Familiar By Thy Side,” including Billy’s tender first scene with Eddie in Eddie’s car, as well as Billy’s confrontation with Agatha back on the Witches’ Road that concludes the episode.
“I always say the big end of Episode 6 scene is what got me the job,” Locke says. “I remember after I was doing it, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, maybe I’m doing all right!’”
Locke and Schaeffer spoke with Variety to answer several burning questions about the episode, including how the production approached William’s Judaisim, simplifying Billy’s origin story from the comic books, the “hardest” scene Locke had to film — and what they think of the fan theories about whether Billy is secretly behind the Witches’ Road.
How early in the development of the show did bringing Billy back enter the picture?
“Early,” Schaeffer says. The showrunner, who also created and executive produced “WandaVision,” told Variety in September about how Agatha kept bubbling up in all of her early development with Marvel Studios for her next series, so she decided to center the show around the character completely. “I was interested in people from Agatha’s past,” she says now. “Agatha, in her best self, is a mentor, a teacher. I wanted her to have a student. So my early idea was this notion of this goth teen — I could see the eyeliner, and imagine he’s a fan of the movie ‘The Craft.’ It was executive producer Mary Livanos who was like, ‘Billy. Billy. It’s Billy.’ So that really launched the idea.”
Why was it important to keep Billy’s identity hidden from the characters and the audience for so long?
“I’m interested in mysteries because I think that they’re fun,” Schaeffer says. “But more than that, I’m interested in strong justification for a mystery.” While conceiving how to drive Agatha’s story forward, Schaeffer and her writing team hit upon the fact that, in the Marvel comics, she also had a son, and that a mysterious teenage boy showing up on her doorstep could trigger that instinct inside her. “The connections between Agatha history and her son and Billy just felt so potent,” Schaeffer says, “as much for the character of Agatha as for the mystery potential for the audience.”
How did the writers decide how to depict Billy’s consciousness inhabiting William’s body?
Schaeffer says that when she learned about Billy’s extremely convoluted origins in the comics — tied up in dense metaphysics involving pieces of the soul of the devilish villain Mephisto — her first reaction was, “What? Say it again?”
“Truth be told, I still don’t fully understand it,” she adds with a laugh. “I’m in for an instinctive plotline, Lord knows, but there were so many steps and so many characters, and I just had no patience for it.”
Fortunately, Marvel Studios has always treated its comic books as inspiration rather than holy writ, so Schaeffer felt at liberty to simplify Billy’s origins as needed. “You want the story to feel correct and familiar, but also still shock and surprise you,” she says.
She says the writers decided that William’s parents should be uncomplicatedly lovely people, in contrast to the “chaos and trauma and destruction and huge global adventures” that swirled around Billy’s parents, Wanda and Vision. “That was a North Star in a lot of ways, of how do we make this feel accessible to regular people?” she says. “That made the narrative shrink.” The idea of William dying in a car accident, meanwhile, evoked the “rupture in time and space” needed to create the mystical opening for Billy to reemerge.
As for whether there’s more to be revealed about Billy’s origins on the show — especially since Billy does hear Mephisto’s name in Episode 3 — Schaeffer just shrugs. “Um, there is just more to be revealed, is what I would say,” she offers. “I would just say that we are over halfway into this narrative, our players are on the board, and we have a lot of meat still left on the bone.”
How did the production decide to open the episode with William’s bar mitzvah?
Along with being one of Marvel’s few LGBTQ superheroes, William Kaplan/Billy Maximoff is also one of Marvel’s rare Jewish superheroes, something that Schaeffer says was “imperative” to depict in the show. Tha included how the production went about casting the role.
“I can’t overstate how much we thought about it,” Schaeffer says. “Casting took a very long time. Ultimately, Joe was the right person for Billy Maximoff, and I’m thrilled that he took the role.”
Although Locke is one of the rare out LGBTQ actors to play a queer superhero, he isn’t Jewish; Schaeffer’s father’s side of the family is Jewish, but she was not raised religious. They both say they are acutely aware of how the decision to cast him as Billy put even more pressure on the show to portray the character’s Judaism faithfully.
“This is something I’ve grappled with over the last few years,” Locke says. “I wanted to make sure that those scenes were tackled with the highest respect. I stressed a lot over making sure that we did that right.”
Locke worked with Rabbi Alexandria Shuval-Weiner for four months on how to sing William’s Haftorah and read from a portion of the Torah. “It’s hard to do speaking and singing in Hebrew from a British accent to an American accent,” he says. “She really helped make sure that we filmed those sequences with the greatest respect.” (Shuval-Weiner even has a brief cameo as William’s rabbi.)
Schaeffer also credits the show’s Jewish writers — including Jason Rostovsky, who wrote “Familiar By Thy Side” — for identifying William’s bar mitzvah as an ideal event for a show about women dedicated to maintaining an ancient tradition. “There were times when I was like, ‘Am I shoehorning this into the story?’” she says. “But I was so moved by what the writers were telling me about the overlap between these women and their understanding of ritual and belief in the sacred, and this opportunity to create this beautiful sequence that is so much about heritage.”
How did the show try to make Locke look 13?
Locke was 19 when he shot “Agatha All Along,” but aging him down to 13 for his scenes as William amounted mostly to hair styles, eyeliner and camera angles.
“I had a day of just hair trials where we tried different hair,” Locke says. “At the end, I was like” — he musses up his hair — “and they were like, ‘Oh wait, that’s good.’”
Schaeffer briefly considered casting a younger actor for these scenes, but decided that would undermine the dramatic weight of watching the character the audience had experienced for the previous five episodes deal with inhabiting William’s body. “So we took off the eyeliner,” she says. “And Joe’s quite tall, so I kept being like, ‘Can we get a higher angle on Joe so that he feels less huge?’”
In the end, though, “it was Joe’s performance” that sold it, Schaeffer says. “We were worried about it, but he’s so deft at conveying an insecurity in yourself.” Besides, she adds, “They do it all the time on ‘Euphoria.’”
Where did the decision to depict what it’s like on the other side of Agatha’s delusions in Episode 1 come from?
Schaeffer cites Episode 4 of “WandaVision” — when the series broke from its rhythm of evoking a classic TV sitcom with each episode to explain what is really going on, which she calls “the rewind” — as a “breakthrough” moment for the show.
“I found that so satisfying as a writer, and I wanted that same hit on this show,” Schaeffer says. “So the idea of pairing the rewind with the explanation of Billy seemed economical — and fun.”
It also afforded Schaeffer a chance to resolve a nagging problem she had with the first episode of “Agatha All Along.” At end of “WandaVision,” Wanda traps Agatha in her sitcom persona as the nosy neighbor, but the new show opens with Agatha trapped in a version of prestige crime dramas called “Agnes of Westview.”
“We didn’t show that transition,” she says. “I don’t like to ask the audience to do more than one step in their minds to understand what’s going on, but ‘Agnes of Westview’ required two steps.” By going back to follow how Billy wound up in Agatha’s life, Schaeffer could show audiences how Agatha lived her life believing she was in a TV show while everyone else in Westview no longer did.
For Locke, getting to recreate his interrogation scene with Hahn was an exercise in desperately trying not to laugh on camera. “I can see myself laughing in that scene,” he says. He’s more proud, though, that he was able to hold his own when Hahn began improvising. “When I first watched the scene, I was like, oh my God, they included my improv, I feel so honored!” he says.
Locke’s proudest ad lib: When Billy says, “C’mon, I do not want to go back in the closet,” as Agatha is stuffing him inside of her closet.
“That was me and Jac together,” he says. “Jac was like, ‘I wasn’t sure if that was something that we could say. And I was like, ‘No, we have to say it.”
How difficult was it to bring Evan Peters’ character back for “Agatha”?
“I can’t actually remember the scheduling of it, but in terms of his interest in it, it was a very easy call,” Schaeffer says of Peters. “He has the absolute best attitude about everything.” The actor brought “specific ideas for lines and jokes” for the poor, put-upon Ralph Bohner, whose time as Agatha’s puppet has shredded his sanity, including creating the totem of animal skulls Ralph uses to ward off black magic. “He made it from, like, props and things that they had on the day,” she says. “That hat has all these etchings in it — that was his idea. The witch spray was his idea. He just jumps all the way in.”
How much concern was there about differentiating the romantic scene between Billy and Eddie in Eddie’s car from similar iconic scenes that Locke’s performed with Kit Connor in “Heartstopper”?
“Oh my gosh, I didn’t think about it at all,” Schaeffer says. “I love ‘Heartstopper.’ It’s wonderful. But it was our intention to come in on 16-year-old Billy Kaplan’s story at a point where he is out and dating. ‘Heartstopper’ is a lot about discovery.”
Locke, meanwhile, was too preoccupied with the scene itself — which was one of his audition pieces — to worry about any perceived similarities with his other show.
“It’s weird, you’d think that I’d find that scene one of the easiest to film, but it was the hardest,” he says. “We actually had to reshoot it. The big monologue-y bit in the middle — I just couldn’t get it. I always find that the scenes that I audition with end up being the hardest, because I know them so well. You do them hundreds of times over the audition process — they become robotic. I lose the naturalism and the realness of it.”
Locke is having great fun, however, with the memes about how much Charlie, his character on “Heartstopper” hates Marvel, whereas Charlie’s boyfriend Nick, a Marvel super-fan, has a mother, aunt, and boyfriend — played by Olivia Colman, Hayley Atwell and Locke — who are all in the MCU.
“I find them funny,” Locke says. “We all laughed about it on set, but the meta-ness of it never came up. I think even [“Heartstopper” creator] Alice [Oseman] drew Nick and Charlie as Hulkling and Wiccan years and years ago, way before the show was even a thing. I only found it recently — it was hilarious.”
How does Billy’s understanding of his magical ability’s evolve?
When Billy first meets Agatha, it seems like he doesn’t yet understand that he is able to do the kind of magic that he performs at the end of Episode 5, when he commands Lilia and Jennifer to throw Agatha off of the Witches Road.
“I always have played it that he was always aware that he can do it,” Locke says. “He just never has the opportunity to do it. We see in Episode 6 that he can’t really control it. It only comes out when it’s an intense moment. We see him being able to read other people’s minds on the start of the episode, so he’s aware of his power. But he doesn’t know the extend of it.”
What about fan theory that Billy is orchestrating the Witches’ Road in the same way his mother was responsible for the sitcom world of “WandaVision”?
“I saw that one, and I found it very interesting,” Locke says with a smile. “There’s some really good theories out there. There’s some really wacky ones too, but they’re also great. One of the best things about having a weekly release for such a secretive, complex show is the fan theories that come out of it. You see things like, ‘Oh, I’ve never even thought there would be a link to that. You’re so wrong, but I see why you think that!’”
Schaeffer — who contended with a tsunami of fan theories for “WandaVision” — also sidesteps addressing any particular suppositions. “It is my deep pleasure to not waste anything, from what’s on the page to what’s in the frame to who is cast, when everything is used with great meaning,” she says. “So I’m so grateful that this is a fandom that pores over every detail. Sometimes that is to the detriment of the watch, because you should let it wash over you — and sometimes it pays off. I would just say, keep watching.”
By way of responding to the notion that Billy is some kind of magical masterminded, Locke does point to the revelation in Episode 6 that his character encountered the other witches in the coven well before Billy met Agatha: Lilia (Patti LuPone) creates the sigil that hides his true identity from all witches; Alice (Ali Ahn) is the Eastview cop who first comes to his aid after the car accident; and Billy obsessively watches skin care regimen videos posted by Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata) on YouTube. He also notes that Billy is meant to be the last witch in the coven: The black heart Lilia writes in Episode 2 with the other names evokes the black heart emoji Eddie sends Billy.
“She just couldn’t write his name because the sigil,” Locke says. “The point of the episode is that all of these witches are fated to be together.”
Now that it’s clear that Billy’s goal at the end of the road is to find Tommy, will we see Tommy at the end of the season?
“I can’t answer that,” Locke says, his eyes growing wide with panic. “Well, I know the answer, but I can’t tell you. There are still a few secrets in there.”
Schaeffer doesn’t budge, either. “It’s just exciting to finally be able to level with the audience that his desire is a reunion with his brother,” she says.
How is Locke handling his upcoming schedule, given that many “Heartstopper” fans are anticipating a Season 4 announcement any day now, and Marvel fans expect Wiccan to play a major role in the MCU beyond “Agatha All Along”?
“My schedule is empty, so it makes it easy,” Locke says. “Whoever wants me first, gets me first. I’ve been so bored the last few weeks. I’ve been very busy the last few years, and this has been the quietest I’ve been pretty much since I got ‘Heartstopper.’ And I hate it. I’m like an overexcited child just locked inside a room.”
Finally, who came up with the “Bohner Family Reunion” T-shirt?
“I am delighted to answer that question,” Schaeffer says. “That would be consulting producer Megan McDonnell. She was instrumental in a lot of ways. But her idea for the ‘Pitch a Tent’? Chef’s kiss.”
And will Marvel be selling them to the public? “I hope so,” Schaeffer says. “We have those shirts. Bless Mary Livanos: She wore hers out at one point, and I had a heart attack. Luckily, no one took any pictures of her.”
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