WandaVision Considered Bringing Aaron Taylor-Johnson Back as Quicksilver

WandaVision shocked fans when it brought Evan Peters into the Marvel Studios family. Peters played Pietro Maximoff, aka Quicksilver, but not in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor was a part of Fox’s X-Men movies which were made separately and existed in a separate cinematic canon from the Avengers movies made by Marvel Studios and Disney. While it turns out the character was not actually any version of Pietro at all, despite all of the Marvel fans thinking this was the launch of a cinematic multiverse, the team behind WandaVision did consider having the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Quicksilver actor from Avengers: Age of Ultron make a come back to reprise the part.

“There definitely were conversations about bringing Aaron Taylor-Johnson back early on, I think Kevin [Feige] talked about this publicly,” Shakman told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “But it was ruled out fairly early on and we’ve already got Vision from back and so Agatha is bringing Pietro into this world, fake Pietro, into this world to further her agenda. And so having that be a recast Pietro worked on our meta level, but it also made sense thematically when we were talking about grief, which is that grief clouds your judgment, you’re willing to believe things you wouldn’t. You’re living in this fantasy of, ‘If this is my brother, even though I don’t know or feel that he’s my brother, I’m willing to accept it because I miss him so much.’”

Having read many of the fan theories and seen so many of the TikToks and social media memes, Shakman is aware that while much of the audience enjoyed seeing Peters at work with Marvel, there exists a portion of the audience which longed for the multiverse connection. “I know there’s some disappointed Quicksilver fans out there,” Shakman says. “It worked on so many different levels that ultimately I’m happy with the decision that we made.”

WandaVision never considered bringing back other characters from Wanda’s traumatic past, such as James Spader’s Ultron. “Some mischievous person added James Spader into our IMDB page years ago and he’s never been at the show,” Shakman explained. “Ultron, I mean, the character is referenced to course, Geraldine brings him up. He’s an important part of Wanda’s past, but he didn’t have a role to play in the story that we were building.”

Read ComicBook.com’s full interview with Shakman here. Shakman will be joining the Phase Zero podcast live on Friday on ComicBook.com’s Twitch channel before the episode is made available on all major podcast platforms. Want to talk more in the mean time? Drop a comment or send some my way on Instagram.