Hayley Atwell found her Doctor Strange 2 cameo a bit "frustrating"
Peggy Carter "had less to do than what she did before she had the shield,” Atwell quipped while discussing The Multiverse Of Madness
Actor Hayley Atwell has been making the rounds this week, promoting her new film Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One while the promoting was good. (I.e., before the oncoming SAG-AFTRA strike shut all such promotional efforts down.) Said tour saw Atwell dip in to Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, where conversation turned, perhaps inevitably, to her long stint in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and, more specifically, to her brief role as an alternate universe version of Peggy Carter in last year’s Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness.
And while Atwell sounds mostly upbeat about the process of shooting her role in the movie—which a) was infamously secretive, and b) ended with her character getting abruptly murdered by a rampaging Elizabeth Olsen—there are some traces of unhappiness that sneak in around the edges. She notes at one point that the decision to kill off the Captain Carter incarnation of the character so abruptly “doesn’t really serve Peggy very well.” Atwell: “When she was like, ‘I could do this all day’ and then followed by she’s immediately cut in half by a frisbee. And the audience being like, ‘She can’t do it all day. Apparently you can’t, so, egg on your face.’”
Atwell also contrasted her brief appearance in the movie with the meatier role she had in the Disney+ What If…? show, calling the Sam Raimi-directed movie “a frustrating moment” in contrast. “She had less to do than what she did before, before she had the shield,” she quipped. That being said, Atwell still expressed her joy at getting to do the stuntwork in the movie—having come in to film her cameo in the midst of shooting M:I 7, and thus thoroughly in the action movie mode—and doesn’t sound overly aggrieved about the entire process. Also, she has a pretty good story about having to wait on a very slow, very loud motorized scooter during the big reveal of one of her co-stars for the sequence, so at least she got a strange laugh out of the whole experience.