WandaVision Director On Handling Wanda’s Terrible Trauma

When Wanda stood face to face with Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, she poignantly told the Mad Titan, “You took everything from me.” At the time, we knew what she meant, we just had not seen the way that so much loss had been impacting her. Wanda lost her entire family and then her husband by the time Endgame rolled around but the Marvel Cinematic Universe had merely described some of those moments without showing half of them. Then came WandaVision. The first Disney+ series from Marvel dove into Wanda’s traumatic past as a means to explain the show’s true meaning and director Matt Shakman took a wonderful script and brought it to vibrant, tragic life.

“Wanda’s trauma is what the show is all about,” Shakman tells ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “It was hard to talk about in press early on when we are just talking about sitcom episodes, but it’s the through line for the whole show. And it’s, I think something that we all have experience with and this year more than ever as we mourn over 500,000 people having died just in this country alone in a pandemic. So I think it has extra resonance now, strangely, but this show is about how do you grieve? How do you come back from loss? Can you come back from loss?”

Moreover, Shakman knows everything Wanda has been through and wanted to make sure that every details of WandaVision had a purpose related to her life. “She’s lost everything,” he says. “She’s lost her parents, she’s lost her brother, she’s lost the love of her life. And it’s from that grief that it unlocks a new power in her that she didn’t even know she had, right? And it’s so then when you go back, hopefully, and you look at the explorations of sitcom that we were doing, that it wasn’t just wackiness for wackiness’ sake, that this was where she was taking solace and where she was building the life that she wished she had had.”

There is only one episode remaining in the series before Wanda heads off to appear in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. While the show’s many questions may not be answered entirely, its central art of exploring Wanda Maximoff’s psyche will be front and center.

“Hopefully it all feels that it’s been building momentum and snowballing towards the end,” Shakman says. “It is continuing to deal with how do you deal with grief and loss and come back from that. And then we’ve introduced some new players on the table as well, or revealed aspects of certain players on the table. So you now have two Visions on the chess board, and what does that mean? Who’s the real Vision?”

Read and watch our full interview with Shakman here. What do you think of WandaVision‘s portrayal of Wanda’s traumatic arc in the MCU? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram!

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Watch WandaVision on Disney+.

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