Joe Locke Became Wiccan in ‘Agatha All Along’ by Using Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch Movement Coach: ‘The Way They Use Their Magic’ Is Similar
Joe Locke is finally able to breathe after the fifth episode of “Agatha All Along” dropped on Disney+. That’s because the installment, titled “Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power,” ends with the long-awaited reveal that Locke’s character Teen is actually Billy, the son of Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch whose also the teenage superhero Wiccan. Fans expected the twist, but it still delivered shock and awe as a Scarlet Witch-like crown formed on Billy’s head.
“It’s so nice. I feel like I’m breathing. I love it,” Locke told Entertainment Weekly about the big secret finally be out there in the world, adding that he took four doses of melatonin the night before the episode started streaming so he’d be able to calm his nerves and sleep.
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“I’m in the U.K. The episode drops at 2:00 a.m.” Locke said. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I’m just going to drug myself and then wake up to my phone blowing up, which it did. The thing that I’ve kept so secret, guarding it with my life is now just in the ether.”
Locke’s Billy/Wiccan revealed himself in somewhat villainous fashion, as he uses his power to bury Agatha (Kathryn Hahn), Lilia Calderu (Patti Lupone) and Jennifer Hale (Sasheer Zamata) into a pit of sinking mud.
“The show starts with Billy being very much the familiar, the secondary to all the witches. Now we know he is also a witch, and that changes things,” Locke said in reaction to the reveal. “Also, we now know that he has the ability to cause harm to them. Therefore, he is now the most powerful person on the Road. What does that change in the dynamic of the group and how does that change the future of those relationships?”
“At the end of episode 5, we don’t know what happens to those witches, but he’s not doing a good thing. We played a lot with, does that make him a bad person? Is he a good person? Which then draws parallels to the motherly figures in his life,” the actor added. “Wanda does evil things but isn’t necessarily evil. Agatha, questionably, is evil, but there’s more to that, as well. We know that he’s been lying to her, and we play a lot with those dynamics of how duplicitous he is. The facade of the fanboy teen, is that completely fake or is that actually still a real part of him? This is the stuff that I found so interesting in playing him.”
Given that Billy is Wanda’s son and they share similar superpowers, it was important for Locke to study Olsen’s movements as the Scarlet Witch. The key to achieving that goal was working with Jennifer White, Olsen’s movement coach who helped develop the hand gestures for Scarlet Witch’s abilities.
“We worked to find similarities in both Billy and Wanda, the way they use their magic,” Locke told Entertainment Weekly. “Fans of the comic corner know that Billy’s powers are pretty much the same as Wanda’s with a few differences, so we wanted to find similarities with that, but also his own finesse.”
Locke said that he emulated Olsen’s hand gestures in the scene where Billy first uses his power to bury Agatha, adding: “In the script, it was written as ‘with a familiar-looking hand gesture, Teen swipes Agatha off the Road.'”
New episodes of “Agatha All Along” debut Wednesday at 9pm ET on Disney+.
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