WandaVision Production Designer Compares Series to LOST Experience

Back in 2004, ABC launched a show which would revolutionize television as we know it with LOST. [...]

By Brandon Davis

Back in 2004, ABC launched a show which would revolutionize television as we know it with LOST. The series followed survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island, offering up one of the most ambitious (and expensive) pilot episodes in network television history. Following the show's success, novelized stories became more common with shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Now, Marvel Studios is getting in on this action with its WandaVision series -- a show which has more in common with LOST than simply being a big, ambitious, and mysterious saga. Both shows share a production designer in Mark Worthington.

"They're very different projects, but they're distinct," Worthington tells ComicBook.com of LOST and WandaVision. "They're similar in this way. They're both doing something that we've not seen before." In other words, don't expect and huge smoke monsters to come crashing down in WandaVision to cast judgement on the survivors... or maybe do? The shows might have stories involving dead people in common, though all true LOST fans know the series never lived up to the too-popular theories of Oceanic 815's passengers having been dead along.

"LOST was taking a huge action film and compacting it into a film," Worthington says. "I had only done feature film before that. So, when they called me in, I had done plane crashes. So that was part of it, right? I wasn't scared. They said I was the only designer they met with who didn't break out in a sweat when they described what they were after because we had to do that in four and a half weeks, the plane crash and it was in Hawaii."

Ultimately, Worthington's impressive resumé which also includes an episodes Watchmen, Star Trek: Discovery, and Umbrella Academy, sees a lot of efforts based on opportunities to do something bold and unique. "I like challenges," Worthington says. "I like to do big things. And I like to do things I haven't done before. So, in that sense, they're similar. I'd never done anything quite like LOST. I'd had some experience. WandaVision is what it is. It's very distinctive. So, I seek those sorts of projects out, as I think you can see my resume and my stuff like that. So I do think it does inform that, in that respect."

Those millions of viewers who watched LOST when it was airing new episodes from 2004 through 2010 were among th first to be trained to pay close attention to detail. The ABC show liked to put Easter eggs and references to future or past storylines throughout its episodes and elsewhere, like in its promotional material or immersive online experiences. Now, WandaVision seems to be raising the bar in meaningful and metaphorical details with every inch of the show seemingly have some significance tied to its overall mysteries.

"There was a lot of collaboration between [director Matt Shakman] and [head writer Jac Schaeffer]," Worthington recalls. "We sat in rooms together for hours and hours going through things and talking about things and things changed. I mean, the script didn't change markedly, isn't like he changed whole storylines, but details and ideas. And Jac's wonderful and really collaborative. That was a great relationship. And [Jesse Hall], the same thing, the cinematographer. It's, again, very handmade thing. All of the Marvel films are. They're these big things, but they're very handmade."

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