Hayley Atwell Says Peggy Carter Would Not Approve Of Captain America Kissing Her Niece

There's no getting around it: if you think too hard about Captain America's relationship with Sharon Carter, it's a little bit weird.

In the comics, Sharon Carter has become Steve Rogers' closest confidant and the love of his life over decades of story...but she was created to fill a void left behind by the woman Cap loved and lost during World War II: Peggy Carter.

When Captain America first thawed out, Sharon was the "younger sister" of Peggy, who by virtue of not having any Super Soldier Serum in her system and having been alive since World War II would have been too old to remain a viable love interest for Cap when he came back 20 years later (at least by comics standards at the time). Sharon was later retconned into being Peggy's niece instead, due to Marvel's rolling timeline. In the movies, Sharon is Peggy's great niece, as revealed in Captain America: Civil War...a movie in which her romantic relationship with Steve Rogers seems to have finally taken off.

Of course, that all happened proximal to the death of Peggy, which adds a new level of awkward beyond just "I'm in love with my ex-girlfriend's family member."

"Well, first of all she'd be turning over in her grave," Hayley Atwell, who played Peggy in the movies, joked during a panel at Dallas Fan Expo. "She'd be like 'no.' And she'd inject herself with the blue serum and become a super villain. She'd break out of her coffin and ground [Sharon]. She'd ground her. Then she'd kick Steve's ass as well."

Atwell continued, "I just feel that, you know - I wouldn't want to date my great aunt's guy. It just feels like it crosses an incestuous boundary. And Peggy just died. That's even more disrespectful, right? It's like, 'don't touch that."' You can't tap that!"

Well...at least she doesn't look just like Peggy, as happened in the comics, right? So there's...something?

"She'd want the best for her and she'd want her dating a good guy," Atwell said, and then referenced a fairly topical issue from the comics: "With this whole 'Hail Hydra' business, I don't know if Steve's good enough for her. So on all levels, it's just a big fat no."

Will we see Peggy again? It's hard to say. She died in Civil War right around the same time Marvel's Agent Carter was cancelled...but fan-favorite characters tend to find ways of popping back up again.