Agatha All Along Actor Joe Locke Insults Marvel Fans

Television

If you had any hope for Marvel and Disney finally trying to win back the goodwill of their fans, one of the main actors of Agatha All Along has confirmed that you can kiss it goodbye. In the WandaVision spin-off starring Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness, Joe Locke plays Teen (seriously), who is described as a “gay familiar with a dark sense of humor who acts as the assistant to Harkness’s coven.” It’s possible that “Teen” is actually Billy Caplan, a gay Young Avengers teammate from the comics whose superhero name is Wiccan, but Locke has referred to the character as “Teen” in interviews, and this is the current MCU, so it’s probably just some random guy named Teen. Teen was featured in a quick clip from the first Agatha All Along trailer that hit before D23, which you can watch below to refresh your memory:

So, yeah, Teen is gay, and I think everyone pretty much knew that already. I also don’t think anyone had much of a problem with it; the criticisms I’ve seen all had to do with the seeming folly of centering a show on Agatha Harkness, a side character from WandaVision who, despite being played by Kathryn Hahn, doesn’t seem suited to lead her own show. Most of the entertainment Marvel Studios makes nowadays raises the question, “Did anyone actually want this?” before anything else, and Agatha All Along is just the next example of that. But Disney and Marvel must hear the foreboding ticking of another bomb about to go off, so they’re doing what they always do and pre-emptively attacking their fans. In an interview with Variety, Joe Locke talks about his role in Agatha, mocking and disparaging Marvel fans as he does so:

“I’m fully aware that the Marvel fandom is far less nice than the ‘Heartstopper’ fandom. There’s going to be a lot of people that just hate everything about the character and everything about what I’ve done with it, and I just have to be OK with that.”

His eyes suddenly take on an impish glint. “Marvel fans are very open with their opinions. But they’re not in a Marvel show, so—” He blows a raspberry. “I’m doing the one thing that they really wish they could be doing. Sorry!”

Is this Joe Locke speaking off the cuff, or is this a Disney brand once again painting its fans as evil bigots to set themselves and their likely-to-fail product up as victims of oppression? If Locke were the only one who said something like this, or even one of two or three, I’d say maybe it’s just coming from him, but this has been a pattern for several years from this company. Look at the way the She-Hulk cast and writers trashed Marvel fans, with lead writer (but not “showrunner,” because Marvel didn’t have those until about a month ago) Jessica Gao making them the villains of her series. Similarly, Taika Waititi shoved that embarrassingly bad “It’s Mighty Thor!” shriekfest from Natalie Portman into Thor: Love and Thunder (which is kind of fitting, as that was an embarrassingly bad movie) to chastise fans for calling her “Lady Thor,” apparently not caring that Thor has been called “the Mighty Thor” since his very first Marvel Comics appearance. It’s hard to believe fans feel like their favorite characters are being disrespected.

To be completely fair, Joe Locke does seem like an uptight hall monitor. At one point in the Variety piece, Kathryn Hahn says she referred to his character as a wizard, and Locke corrected by saying he and the women in the cast were all witches. Could you imagine having to work with someone like that every day? Still and all, Marvel is at a point now where they need to stop losing, and while Deadpool & Wolverine is certainly a life preserver, they’re not nearly out of the woods yet. Disney+ still isn’t solvent, and Agatha All Along probably won’t help it. Under those circumstances, I don’t think they’d let an actor go off-script to the media like this. That doesn’t mean it’s a good strategy, though. The stories – which began with Chris Gore – say that Marvel is ditching its woke experiment, although it still has to release the next round of duds before we can see any tangible evidence of that. But I’d think they would stop antagonizing their fans like this, even if their next few projects are going to crash and burn. Smugness is a hard habit to shake.

Let us know what you think of Joe Locke’s comments and Agatha All Along in the comments!