Agatha All Along star Joe Locke reveals one scene completely broke him

Watch: Agatha All Along star Joe Locke reveals the scene that completely broke him

When you’re sharing the screen with possibly one of the biggest stage legends of all time, you probably want to try and maintain a certain level of stoicism. But that was easier said than done for Joe Locke, as he says starring opposite Patti LuPone in Agatha All Along, the Marvel spin-off series of the 2021 sensation WandaVision, left him in stitches.

Locke plays a mysterious character known only as ‘Teen’ in the series, which follows ousted witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) as she tries to assemble a new coven. Alongside the likes of Aubrey Plaza and SNL alum Sasheer Zamata, one of them is LuPone’s Lilia Calderu, a 400-year-old witch moonlighting as a fortune teller.

Read more: What you need to know about Agatha All Along

“There's actually a bit, I think it's actually in the trailer, where Patti does these weird noises,” Locke tells Yahoo UK, about a scene where LuPone is giving her best Mystic Meg with a crystal ball. “And if you look at me, I'm fully crying with laughter. I was completely breaking, I was wetting myself with laughter and you can just see me in the background.”

“I was talking to Jac [Schaeffer, the showrunner] about it last week,” he adds, “and they hadn't noticed that that was the take that they'd used - none of them had seen that in the edit. But Patti was making me laugh so much, which sort of sums up how it would be on set every day.”

Agatha All Along is only Locke’s second-ever on-screen role after Netflix's queer YA series Hearstopper, which launches its third season next month. He landed the role back in 2022, just a few months after he, at 18 years old, was first introduced to the world. Speaking about landing on Locke for the secretive role, showrunner Jac Schaeffer —who also helmed WandaVision— says he clicked instantly.

“First, there's his look, right? I mean, he's gorgeous, but he's gorgeous in a witchy way, like his dark hair and the dark brows and his jaw and cheekbones — he's just stunning,” she says. “But he has this sort of earnestness and he plays ‘Teen’ with that kind of wide-eyed thing. He also has enormous depth and enormous gravity. And this is a complicated character, you know, much like Agatha.”

Locke’s ‘Teen’ is a die-hard fan of Hahn’s Agatha. If there was an Agatha Updates account online, he’d be running it. For Locke, pretending to be obsessed with Kathryn Hahn wasn’t a stretch, as he says the pair immediately bonded on-set.

“She's just the most incredible person, actress, human,” he says, bubbling with effusiveness. “I have learned so much from her about acting. She's so incredibly talented and being able to watch her work was the best. She's been a really big mentor for me, and I love her so much.”

The series catches up with Agatha almost immediately after the events of WandaVision. In case you need a refresher for a three-year-old series, after attempting a magical coup in Wanda’s (Elizabeth Olsen) idyllic Westview enclave, Wanda leaves her trapped there without her powers under the false identity of Agnes. Like its predecessor, which revolutionised the idea of what a Marvel show could be with its playful approach to sitcom genres, Agatha All Along has Hahn bouncing between TV tropes as the character attempts to regain her identity.

“We like to say that the tone of the show is Kathryn Hahn, so anything Kathryn can do that is our tone,” says Schaeffer about messing around with genres again for this series. “We worked backwards in a lot of ways, so we retrofitted it a bit because we want to see her lie, we want to see her perform, we want to see her con. It was kind of a funny way to work, but WandaVision was similar. It was like, okay, so we want to be in a sitcom, what would motivate that? How do you, how do you box characters into those scenarios?”

The show opens as a bleak Scandinavian police procedural, speed-running Agatha through a series of identity changes —much like in WandaVision— before finally landing on a ‘90s-tinged celestial goth theme. The series is littered with easter eggs dedicated to iconic pop culture witches, which Schaeffer says she took inspiration from when it came to moulding Agatha’s tone.

“For me personally, The Craft (1996) is a really big movie. I love that film, and it felt very like you can draw a line from The Craft to the character of ‘Teen’, which felt very right,” she says.

She also called on visual inspiration from other ‘90s classics like the Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman-starring Practical Magic (1998) and The Witches of Eastwick (1987), starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon. “The way those witches were featured in the frame together, they're so beautiful, but beyond that, they seem powerful. That was something I spoke to our DP, Caleb Heymann, about early on, because I was like, ‘How do we do this?’”

Agatha All Along has been more than two years in the making, and for Locke, the release can’t come soon enough. “I love a gossip, so I've had to train myself to be tight-lipped,” he says about the infamous Marvel cloak of secrecy.

Between Agatha All Along and Heartstopper, which boasts one of Netflix’s most ardent fanbases, Locke’s short career has been an exercise in keeping schtum. “With Hearstopper, there's not really much you can spoil — Heartstopper is definitely more of a character show than a plot show - but there are still things that Netflix have to keep reminding us, like, ‘You know, maybe you shouldn't say that’, so it’s definitely given me some training,” he says.

“[But Agatha All Along] actually has been not as hard as I thought it would be because the secrets are so integral to the success of the show. I've kept these secrets for two years and I can finally almost tell people about them.”

Agatha All Along premieres with its first two episodes on Disney+ on Thursday, 19 September.