Agent Carter EPs Discuss Season 2, How Peggy Is The New Coulson, And More

Agent Carter is back tonight with a new season that will return to the 1940s era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing our heroine, Peggy Carter, to the West Coast for a new adventure.

Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas return as executive producers and showrunners, steering Peggy’s life into new relationships, including those of a romantic nature.

Butters and Fazekas spoke to ComicBook.com about what the second season of Agent Carter holds, including the introduction of Peggy’s new adversary Whitney Frost, romantic interest Jason Wilkes, and how Agent Carter is the new Agent Coulson.

Agent Carter Season 2 moves out to California, and the change in locale seems to come with a lightened tone. The premiere episodes are a little less noir and a little more upbeat, with more humor. Was that something that you were specifically wanting to do in Season 2? Did the change of setting lead to the change in tone, or vice versa?

Michele Fazekas: It’s interesting because I think the story we’re telling is still very noir, structurally, so if you think of … Last year we were always talking about movies like L.A. Confidential or Chinatown, both of which happen to take place in L.A., and a lot of noir took place in Los Angeles.

Which is part of why we moved the show to L.A., also because we shoot here, which made it a little easier. So the story is, think of L.A. Confidential. You have the Night Owl massacre in L.A. Confidential, which seems to be this isolated incident, and you peel back the layers and it reveals this huge web of conspiracy that involves all of these different entities, so we were sort of inspired by that for the story telling in season two.

We did intentionally want to embrace the look and the feel of old Hollywood in the 1940s, so there’s a little bit more of a glow that sort of infuses everything, which I really love. It’s sort of what Across the Border was to wardrobe, and to hair and makeup, because we have the Hollywood actors there, so I think that part of it is the story is informing on the look, and the location is also informing on the look. Which I really like. I love the look of last season too, embracing something new without feeling like a totally different show.

As far as the question about humor, part of it is we have the freedom to do it. So many of our first season shows – especially since we only had eight episodes – you’re focused on establishing what the show is, and explaining to viewers “Here’s the players, here’s what the show’s about.” It’s also about the writers finding what the show is about.

I think we’re all comfortable with the show, we don’t feel like we have to invent what the show is now, so I think that left us a little more room for using some humor.

My interpretation of Season 1’s themes was Peggy finding her place among her peers, and Peggy getting over what happened with Captain America. How would you describe her character arc in Season 2?

Tara Butter: Peggy’s journey in Season 2 is sort of rediscovery in some ways, she’s finding herself. She’s put the other things to bed, she knows she’s respected, she’s let go of Cap, like you said, and now she’s kind of in this new place in Los Angeles working this case, and she’s open to new experiences and potentially love.

So I think that it’s very interesting to see Peggy less confident. In her relationships, that is not where she feels as confident as she does in her work environment. So I think there’s some fun we were able to have with exploring what she wants and with who.

Michele Fazekas: On sort of the SSR front, the other arc that we developed over the ten episodes is in the vein of a film noir, but reversed. If you think of a film noir, like Chinatown, Jack Nicholson’s driving around Chinatown, and he’s very cynical and removed, and sort of above it all, and he gets wrapped up in the case so much that he is so personally invested in doing the right thing, he sacrifices himself, he doesn’t even care about himself anymore. He just cares about doing the right thing.

Peggy’s already like that. Peggy’s an idealist. Her ideal person is Captain America. There’s no one better than Captain America, and she’s always striving for that, and she expects everyone around her to strive for the same thing. She has a bit of a wake-up call in the second season, whereas she’s going along, she’s starting to discover that not everyone around her is good. Not everyone in the SSR is good, and it’s a bit of a reality check or at least a bit more realism. Weirdly, one of the people that sort of urges her to see things for what they are is Dottie, because Dottie seems to know a lot more that she’s hiding. So she has an interesting arc where there are positive things happening and there are some difficult discoveries that she’s going to make by the end of the season.

This season, you’re introducing Whitney Frost, who in the comics is the modern Iron Man villain Madame Masque. What can you tell us about your version of Madame Masque? You’ve already noted that she won’t have her gold mask, so how is she translating to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, andalso into this era of the past?

Michele Fazekas: The great thing about Marvel is, because there are so many different versions of all these characters, we’re not told by anybody at Marvel “You have to do this version of this character,” so in many ways we’ve done our own versions of a lot of the characters that we’ve introduced, like Fennhoff. Whitney Frost, and Madame Masque, is sort of our version of that character. We have nods to the mask, we have nods to why she wears that mask.

We’ve also sort of merged that character with Hedy Lamarr, who in the forties was also an inventor, and sort of like this scientific genius. We really liked that, so that’s sort of where Whitney starts in the beginning of this episode. She’s very famous, but she’s this sort of secret genius who operates through her husband in this very Lady Macbeth way. It’s really fun to sort of compare and contrast her with Peggy Carter, because they’re very similar, both beautiful, smart women, but both very different.

Peggy leads with her power, she’s fine to kick everyone’s ass, and Whitney feels like she has to hide that, because she’s been told her whole life, “You are not valued for your brains, you’re valued for what you look like.” It’s very interesting to have time to explore how these two women ended up where they are.

Are there plans to revisit Leviathan this season, or to introduce other villains?

Michele Fazekas: You’re not going to see Leviathan from season 1. I do think that the nice thing is we have Dottie, who comes back and obviously she’s from the first season. You’ll see Angie, and you’ll end up seeing…

Tara Butters: Howard Stark?

Michele Fazekas: Howard Stark. We also introduce a character named Vernon Masters, who’s played amazingly by Kurtwood Smith, who Tara and I worked with on Resurrection, and when we were creating this character we were in the writer’s room like, “He’s kind of like a Kurtwood Smith.” And they were like “Maybe he could actually be Kurtwood Smith.”

He’s Thompson’s boss slash mentor, who, like Thompson, has an agenda, but his agenda is far more developed than Thompson’s. What I like about a character like Thompson is he’s not a bad guy, but he’s an opportunist and he’s very ambitious, so sometimes he makes bad choices, to use a preschool term.

Vernon knows this about him, and Vernon uses this to manipulate him into what he wants to do, because Vernon is not entirely on the up-and-up. Kurtwood is so great in this role. Everything he’s in I can’t stop watching.

What can you tell me about this mysterious Zero Matter that we keep hearing about, and how does it tie Agent Carter to the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Tara Butters:Zero Matter is Darkforce. Because it’s new, they’ve never seen it before, our people-

Michele Fazekas: Isodyne –who’s like our version of Rocketdyne – they just named it “zero matter,” they don’t know what it is.

Tara Butters: Obviously Darkforce was in S.H.I.E.L.D. and has a connection with Doctor Strange. It is something from another dimension that has properties that when a person has been exposed to it, it can kill them, it can give them powers, and, with each person, potentially affects them differently. It definitely is part of the “Marvel” of our season.

In Sesaon 1, you snuck in a good handful of Easter eggs for Marvel fans to spot. Did you do the same thing this season? Are there things that those die-hard Easter egg hunters should be keeping an eye out for?

Michele Fazekas: Yes. We try whenever we can.

Were there things that you thought about doing in Season 1 that you couldn’t find a place for that you made sure to include in Season 2?

Michele Fazekas: I don’t know. The only thing that comes to mind is that in Season 1 it was very hard for Peggy to have a personal life. I’m not even talking about a dating life, I’m just talking about having things outside of the office, because when she’s on the case its seems stupid to say, “Well I’m going to go out and have dinner with the girls.”

We’d always planned, first season, to have an episode where you see her out with the women from the – I can’t remember where she lives – but then the job sort of interferes. We never found a place for that, because she’s not going to go out for dinner when she has to save the world. One of the things we did in this season was incorporate the people who are her friends and her confidantes more into her world. We have Ana Jarvis, who she hasn’t had to keep secrets from because she knows what Jarvis does. So they have a nice rapport.

We beefed up the character Rose, who’s played by Leslie Burns. She did a couple episodes last season. She played the woman who works at the operator who says, “Love the hat,” in the pilot. We know Leslie because she was a series regular on Ed that Tara and I worked on. She did that as a favor to us. We were like, “Would you just come in and say this this line?” and she was like, “Sure.” Because we know how good she is, and she’s just wonderful, we said, “Let’s eventually utilize her.” So Rose comes out to L.A. with Sousa, and she actually has some fun stuff to do.

Tara Butters: What it does is give Peggy more people to confide in. I also think we had a little character moment this year. I mean, it’s not to take away from the mystery or the investigation, but I do feel like the character moments really stand out for me; where do the different relationships go?

With the Darkforce connection, and Peggy’s relationship with Captain America, and her appearance in Ant-Man, it seems more and more that Agent Carter – both the show and the character – is becoming a kind of a cornerstone for the MCU, and we’re finding out more and more how much of the Marvel Universe is built on things she was involved with. Does that present a challenge when you’re writing stories for her? Can we expect to see more of those kind of connections as the season continues, and the show and the Marvel Cinematic Universe continue to grow?

Michele Fazekas: I think the nice thing is, because we take place before much of the Marvel Universe has happened, we have a lot of freedom in that regard. I think any time Peggy shows up in the features or in other iterations of the Marvel Universe, we’re never dictated to like, “You have to have her in this place at this time,” so I think it’s a wide enough of a deal. We’ve only done now 18 episodes of “Agent Carter,” so I think…

Tara Butters: It’s funny. In the earlier Marvel movies, it was Coulson that kind of connected everything, and then at some point it feels like it became Peggy. Just as a viewer, I have to say I love it. For my kids, who are eight and ten, they started watching Agent Carter first, and then wanted to watch all the movies that Peggy was in. It was how they got into the Marvel Universe.

You’ve mentioned Peggy’s personal relationships being a focus this season. Can you talk a little bit about her new love interest, Dr. Jason Wilkes, and what it is that she finds interesting and attractive about him? How does this affect her relationship with Sousa?

Michele Fazekas: I’ll answer the Sousa question first. When Peggy comes out to L.A., time has passed. Six months to a year has passed, and we find out that Sousa kind of ghosted Peggy, and she doesn’t really know why, or she doesn’t want to address why, and so when she comes out and sees he’s involved with somebody else, there’s this weird sort of disappointment within her like, “Well, maybe I kind of missed the boat on this.”

So when she meets Wilkes, they have this instant chemistry, and I think what she likes about him, and the way we designed the character is, we wanted him to be really different from anybody in her life. He’s different than Cap, he’s different than Sousa, he’s brilliant and charming, but he’s also odd and quirky and I think she’s sort of intrigued by that.

They also share a similarity in the fact that he is an African American man in the scientific industry. She is a woman in the SSR. They’re both used to people looking at them and making a decision about who they are just based on what they look like, and I think they’re used to people saying you can’t do that because you are this or that. I think they can sort of connect on that level.

He’s also just a genuinely good person, and that’s something Peggy keeps telling him over and over, which I think is probably a really important thing for Peggy.