Marvel Cinematic Universe costume designer Daniel Selon teases creating the looks of the Agatha All Along characters in a new interview with Screen Rant. One of the big fan-favorite characters who joined the MCU timeline in The Multiverse Saga was Agatha Harkness, played by Kathryn Hahn, in the WandaVision TV show. Following her role as the main antagonist, the Marvel witch is now set to headline her own spinoff, Agatha All Along.
Picking up after the WandaVision story, Agatha All Along explores Agatha’s path to reclaiming her powers, which requires her to form a new coven. Together, they will take on the challenges that await them on the Witches’ Road while also giving the MCU another taste of magic in the franchise. With Agatha All Along coming from WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer, the MCU spinoff is also bringing back a lot of familiar faces both in front and behind the camera.
With Agatha All Along releasing this week, Screen Rant attended the premiere at El Capitan and interviewed Selon about his work as the main costume designer following his work on the WandaVision series. Throughout the interview, Selon breaks down how crucial it was to nail down the perfect looks for all of the witches on Agatha All Along while also celebrating the on-screen portrayal of witches from different decades. Selon also shares which major character from the comics he would love to tackle in the MCU for future projects.
Daniel Selon Shares His Journey From WandaVision To Agatha All Along
“I really loved revisiting some of the town’s characters… and re-imagining them.”
Screen Rant: I know you’ve worked on MCU projects before, specifically WandaVision, but now this is a whole new set of responsibilities. What is it like to step into Agatha All Along as the main costume designer?
Daniel Selon: It was such an incredible opportunity, and I keep joking that my journey on this show really paralleled the journey of the witches because I really got to step into my power. It was a total joy, also super intimidating. But I had an incredible team, two brilliant assistant costume designers, and we just made for a very powerful little coven to make some really beautiful costumes.
Speaking of WandaVision, this show begins with the remnants of Westview from where the events of the last show left us. How do you take what you did there or what was done there and reintroduce us to that world into the Agnes that we meet in that first episode?
Daniel Selon: It was really fun to revisit the town of Westview and pick up. There is a little bit of an artificiality to that place, not only because of what we know that Wanda did to the town and the people in it, but we also had to create a distinction between Westview and the place that Agatha goes in the show, the space where she journeys. I really loved revisiting some of the town’s characters, and putting them into the show, and re-imagining them as developing who they are in the real world.
Daniel Selon On Creating The Look Of Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal In Agatha All Along
“It’s a challenge; you have to sort of serve all these different masters…”
The first new witch that we meet is Rio, and I know everyone’s looking out for the Easter eggs of the coding of who everyone is and what they mean in the larger fabric. How do you start with a brand new character and make sure that you’re putting your stamp on her, but also fitting her into the MCU?
Daniel Selon: It’s a challenge, you have to sort of serve all these different masters. You have to pull from the comic lore and make sure that you’re touching all of the classic things, like the silhouette or any symbols. That was important to bring in. But for the character of Rio, there was a pretty wide open expanse of what we could do and create. I really drew from the natural world, and you’ll see a lot of inspiration from nature, real-life systems, [and] actual geological forms on her costumes. That was all with the intention of her feeling sort of epic and powerful and sort of beautiful nature.
Daniel Selon On Modernizing Jennifer Kale In The MCU For Agatha All Along
Would you say that that’s how all four witches of the coven are created because they each have the kind of witch they’re meant to be? Does that go into how you style them?
Daniel Selon: Certainly, yeah. It was important to identify what each witch’s power was, what kind of witch they were and what their history was. We looked at where geographically each of them originated from. Lilia Calderu comes from Italian descent, and so does Patty LuPone. It was really fun to put those two things together, and boy, was she excited about that. But I think [for] a character like Jennifer Kale, [who] exists in the comics, the comic costume was not something that was going to be necessarily appropriate for the real-world modern-day story we were telling, so we took some of the shape-language from the comic character and made it into jewelry and symbols and things that were of a smaller scale that would be a real-life representation of what we saw in the comics.
Daniel Selon On The Importance Of Joe Locke’s Costume For Agatha All Along
What can you say about dressing Joe Locke’s character, Teen? We don’t know who he is, but we all think we know who he might be. What would you say about how you define him stylistically?
Daniel Selon: Teen is such an incredible character, and I feel a very parental pride around the creation of him because his character is such a perfect age, and at that age, everyone is trying to figure themselves out. It really is this journey of identity and uncovering your identity. It was important to me, on the costume, to help Joe in his performance to figure out that everything he was wearing was something that maybe he created or he manipulated as you do when you’re crafty in your bedroom and you have a sewing machine or you have a white out pen and you want to doodle on your jeans. We kind of made a back story for each of his garments that we could all get on board, and that would give Joe something to sort of support his portrayal.
Daniel Selon On How Agatha All Along Celebrates The History Of Witches
Getting onto the Witches’ Road is kind of the crux of the story, and there are so many exciting and elaborate sets there. What kind of conversations do you have with both Jac Schaeffer and the rest of the team to ensure there’s a cohesive vision for each trial?
Daniel Selon: It was super important to make sure that we were all on the same page about the different iterations that we would see for all of the different sets. Everything is a bit genre based, so we were always having conversations about, what are the horror references? What are the film references? That was something we were very successful with in WandaVision, was sort of identifying exactly the year or the TV show that we were hanging our hat on. For this, we did the same thing with different references of films or characters or witches that we wanted to pay our respects to or honor or sort of lampoon sometimes. I think that’s just the greatest joy of this corner of the MCU is the way that it is constantly turning and transforming.
Did you have a witch era or genre that you were most excited to dive into?
Daniel Selon: The seventies was just so fun to make women look fabulous and feel fabulous and then when there’s music involved, everyone couldn’t wait until we got to that section to film. As I got closer and closer to the day, everybody was like, ‘Can I have another costume fitting?’ Just to get it perfect, we really wanted to make sure that I had enough flowy garments and things that would sparkle under the lights.
Was there a character whose execution changed the most from conception to the final product?
Daniel Selon: Definitely – Rio Vidal’s character was really a long journey to get to the design that you see in the show. I think we did over 100 different iterations of the costume, imagining it with different silhouettes, fabrics, and colorways because we all had different ideas about what it meant to be a green witch. I really love where we ended up. I think it really was befitting of Aubrey Plaza and her incredible portrayal.
Daniel Selon’s Dream MCU Character To Design For After Agatha All Along
Is there another MCU character that you can’t wait to design for?
Daniel Selon: That’s a really great question. I think because everybody always wants to know when Mephisto is going to show up. I’ve got dibs! I want to have a word with Mephisto! I want to tell Mephisto what he’s wearing.
Daniel Selon’s Experiences On Good Mythical Morning & Agatha All Along
I know you’ve also worked a lot with Good Mythical Morning, which was very surprising to me. It seems like such a different style. How different is it doing the costume design for that versus your journey to the MCU?
Daniel Selon: Oh, that’s so interesting. Rhett and Link are such a joy to work with because they are super irreverent in their approach to everything that they make, and they’re also very intellectual. When you play a clown, but you do it from a smart angle, you really get something wonderful. That’s how we liked to create when I was working with them on Good Mythical Morning and it was very fast. We would just sort of throw an idea out there and race towards it.
This is very similar over here. There’s a lot of development that goes into these costumes and these ideas, so we take more time to do that, which is a deep pleasure because I just get to go so hard on the details. But there’s definitely a connection there between the depth of creation.
More About Agatha All Along Season 1
In Agatha All Along, the infamous Agatha Harkness finds herself down and out of power after a suspicious goth Teen helps break her free from a distorted spell. Her interest is piqued when he begs her to take him on the legendary Witches’ Road, a magical gauntlet of trials that, if survived, rewards a witch with what they’re missing. Together, Agatha and this mysterious Teen pull together a desperate coven, and set off down, down, down The Road…
Check out our other Agatha All Along interviews with:
Agatha All Along
will release the first two episodes September 18, on Disney+, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday.
