“I like being an underdog,” Elizabeth Olsen said in a phone call on Tuesday afternoon, just hours after she earned her first-ever Emmy nomination for her starring role on Wandavision. Unfortunately for her, maybe, those days seem to be over. Olsen’s Disney+ series scored a massive 23 Emmy nominations—the most for any limited series, including more traditional prestige projects like Mare of Easttown and The Queen’s Gambit, and the second-most of any TV show this year, period. With additional drama series nominations for genre fare like The Boys, Lovecraft Country, and fellow Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the Emmy embrace of superheroes, witches, and other supernatural beings seems to be complete.
Not that the Wandavision team expected it to happen, at least like this. “Honestly, I was like, if we have one nomination, we will have won,” says series showrunner Jac Schaeffer, who also earned a writing nomination. “The cards are kind of stacked against the superhero space when it comes to recognition and awards.”
By the time nominations morning arrived, Schaeffer may have been the only one— most pundits were betting big on Wandavision, though maybe not 23 nominations big— but when it started, Wandavision really was an underdog. It became the first Marvel project on Disney+ basically by accident, when the pandemic delayed production on other shows, meaning that the bright new future of Marvel on television was being introduced by a defiantly oddball story about grief, sorcery, and classic television. “I felt very secure early on sort of occupying this little corner of the sandbox,” Schaffer says. “The idea was that Falcon and the Winter Soldier would go first and, and that we could be weird in this little space.”
Instead, Wandavision debuted in mid-January at the peak of a world-altering pandemic, which many viewers had spent stuck at home and, like Wanda Maximoff herself, filtering their realities through television. “There was sort of an element of kismet to it,” Schaeffer says. “The content of the show itself ended up being a reflection of what so many people were doing in their own homes, you know, retreating into their favorite shows as a form of comfort.”
On Emmy nominations morning, both Olsen and Schaeffer were busy sharing the celebration with the rest of the team, though it wasn’t easy to take in the scope of the success. (“Holy shit!” Olsen exclaimed when informed of the 23 nominations). In addition to Olsen, co-stars Paul Bettany and Kathryn Hahn were nominated, in addition to a whole slew of people from the hair and makeup, editing, costume, production design, and music teams. (Two-time Oscar winners Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez were of course nominated for the ultimate earworm “Agatha All Along,” which Schaeffer calls the “absolute icing on the cake” of the show.)
The question now, of course, is how Wandavision fares at the awards up against what’s undoubtedly some of the stiffest competition at the Emmys, all of them shows lead by similarly titanic female performances: Mare of Easttown, I May Destroy You, The Underground Railroad, and The Queen’s Gambit. “I do think females are dominating television right now,” Olsen says, noting that the night before she’d been “laughing my ass off” watching the Jennifer Coolidge and Connie Britton-led The White Lotus. Schaeffer, for her part, says she was obsessed with the red herrings of Mare of Easttown as everybody else, and credits Michaela Coel and I May Destroy You for smashing the form of television “in the most glorious and violent and thought-provoking and moving way.”
The bittersweet thing about limited series is that all of these people only get one shot at recognition (yes, Big Little Lies won a bunch of limited series Emmys and then came back for a second season, but they’re the exception, not the rule). Olsen and Wanda Maximoff will be back soon, appearing in 2022’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and Schaeffer signed an overall deal with Marvel in May, meaning she may well bring a new idea that’s as “totally bananas” as Wandavision was. It’s hard not to be sad that Wandavision’s sitcom riffs are gone for good, but Schaeffer is already confidently looking toward the future: “the bounty of worlds inside of the MCU never leaves me wanting for more.”
— The Making of Mare of Easttown’s Flirtatious, Sad Bar Scene
— Elizabeth Olsen on Reclaiming Her Power in WandaVision
— How William Jackson Harper Brought Hope to The Underground Railroad
— A Golden Globe Voter Speaks Out About Her HFPA Resignation
— Why Is Gina Carano on the Emmy Ballot for The Mandalorian?
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