‘Agatha All Along’ stars Kathryn Hahn and Patti Lupone on Lilia’s death scene

Patti Lupone was at a crossroads.

“I trashed my [Actors’ Equity Association] card — ‘Enough of that’ — and I was sitting in my kitchen table going, ‘I wonder what direction my career is going to take me?” she recalls on The Awardist podcast, referring to her professional life in 2022, having left the theatrical performers’ union amid growing frustration with the group.

But then, she got a call from the most unexpected of places: Marvel.

“When that happens, I don’t say no because it’s a kick. It’s a slap in somebody’s face. [It’s] the universe [saying], ‘This is what you’re supposed to do,'” the three-time Tony and two-time Grammy winner explains.

The studio wanted her to play Sicilian witch Lilia Calderu in the WandaVision spinoff series, Agatha All Along. As fate would have it, Lupone had just finished season 11 of American Horror Story, where she played a tarot card reader. For Agatha, her “test” was a tarot card reader. And Lupone thinks she is a Sicilian witch.

“It all sort of lined up,” she says, sitting next to her Agatha costar Kathryn Hahn, who Lupone cites as another big reason for wanting to be part of the series. “I’m a huge fan of this woman.”

Two two — along with Joe Locke, Debra Jo Rupp, Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, and Ali Ahn — took fans on a weekly journey down the Witches’ Road (and gave us this earworm in the process) as Agatha tried to regain her powers, confronting former foes along the way.

Hahn, who received an Emmy nomination for playing Agatha in WandaVision, says she’s “blindly just jumped in” when she got the call about a spinoff, but was reassured knowing that show’s creator, Jac Schaeffer, and producer Mary Livanos were leading the way on Agatha. Over the next few months, once the actress started to hear more about the show, “the more turned on I was. And then when casting started to come in, it was like Christmas morning every time they would call,” she says.

As for Agatha’s story arc, Hahn says she was excited to see what Agatha would learn about herself. “I don’t think she’s the most self-reflective witch,” she explains. “So the idea of the swirling of the Witches’ Road was really going deeper and deeper into who she was, that maybe she had blocked off or was not connected to. And further and further we got as an audience to see what was running the engine underneath her bluster and sarcasm. Of course, there was some s—.”

Those discoveries kept raising a big question: “Was she born evil? Because so many people tell her that,” Hahn explains.

As the seven faced down the menacing trials laid out before them — and tried to evade the pursuing Salem Seven, the children of a group of witches that Agatha killed in self-defense — not everyone would walk away unscathed…or alive. Lupone’s Lilia included. With swords precariously dangling above them, the witches have to place a selection of tarot cards in a specific order. While they’re eventually successful, right down to the wire, the Salem Seven are also hot on their heels — so Lilia sacrifices herself to also kill the Salem Seven.

“It was really heartbreaking,” Lupone recalls of filming the episode 7 scene, where Lilia flips one of the tarot cards, causing the room to invert and the Salem Seven to fall to their deaths on the swords. She hangs on to the table…until she can’t anymore.

“The thing that culminated for me was when I said, ‘I love being a witch.'”

“Oh, god…” Hahn says, sinking back in her seat.

“That was the end of my involvement with these women and Joe and Jac and the rest of the crew. And it was the end of Lilia,” Lupone explains. “It was our essence. It was what we had embraced for this entire six-month shoot… It was more than just meeting my demise in a minute.”

Hahn recalls everyone being “a wreck that day. We had all known that line was coming, and we knew that it was going to be brutal. And even when it happened, it was even somehow more heartbreaking.”

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But, Lupone still isn’t willing to accept that Lilia could truly be gone forever.

“I will just say, you never see Lilia land,” she says, referring to the shot where Lilia plunges toward the swords. Adds Hahn: “[You] never hits those words.”

And Lupone has a fun idea for how to keep the possibility of Lilia’s return alive, one she shared with Marvel boss Kevin Feige when he came to see her on Broadway in The Roommate.

“I said, ‘You know what you should do in all the Marvel movies? You should have a tiny Lilia falling in the corner… I just want to make sure that everybody knows, we never saw her [land].”

Listen to Hahn and Lupone’s full interview on The Awardist podcast below, where they also chat about filming the sequence with those swords that really were falling all around them, how Agatha is unlike anything they’ve been part of, and their mutual bad auditions for the Coen brothers — and Lupone shares why a reboot of Life Goes On isn’t moving forward, and Hahn looks back on the American remake of Ab Fab that never moved past the pilot.