PaleyFest 2025: ‘Agatha All Along’ Panel

“The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” may have been sung, but that doesn’t mean the celebration is over. This year’s PaleyFest also had a panel celebrating Agatha All Along on March 22, 2025. I had the opportunity of attending the panel (and witnessing the red carpet beforehand).

Warning: this write-up does contain SPOILERS!

Moderated by Ash Crossan, the panel included Jac Schaeffer (the creator, showrunner, executive producer, and director of three of the episodes), Kathryn Hahn (Agatha Harkness), Sasheer Zamata (Jennifer Kale), Ali Ahn (Alice Wu-Gulliver), and Debra Jo Rupp (Sharon Davis/Mrs. Hart).

Crossan started out by asking Hahn and Schaeffer why the show has struck a chord with audiences. “I think this whole show is about the underdog and about people that haven’t been necessarily seen or celebrated,” Hahn answered. “I also think it’s just funny and unexpected: I think we’re all a part of a coven.”

“One of the pieces of mythology that the show is sort of predicated on is the idea that women in groups are more powerful,” Schaeffer added.

Crossan then moved to the other characters. She asked each of them what their takeaway or connection to the show. “I feel like a big theme in the show was trust, especially for each character,” Zamata said. “But I feel like Jennifer Kale’s journey was opening herself up to other people in general and trusting people and trusting the process and the journey. I identify with that: I feel like it is a journey to be able to open yourself up and be vulnerable to an opportunity or to a lesson.”

“I mean, a little inter-generational trauma,” Ahn answered with a laugh. “I think we all got a little bit of that, right? And mommy issues.”

Schaeffer was also the creator and head writer for WandaVision, so Crossan asked her at what point she realized she wanted to create a series solely about Agatha. “After WandaVision, I was invited by Marvel to come back and develop something,” Schaeffer began. “So I had sort of an incubation period where I was was like, ‘Is it this character? Is it this character?’. And in every single character that I sort of set on a journey, it would be like, ‘And in episode three, Agatha Harness shows up.’ So at a certain point, Kevin Feige was like, ‘Do we just make the show about it?’”

Crossan then followed up with Hahn, asking what stuck out about those initial conversations about the show. “It was so unexpected and unbelievable,” she answered. “I had had so much fun as Agatha. And the fact that Jac was interested in doing a really deep dive into her was thrilling. I trust anything that this woman writes. What I didn’t expect is that it was surprising in an entirely different way than WandaVision.”

“With WandaVision and with Agatha, it was about the woman in question,” Schaeffer added. “WandaVision is about Wanda and how, like, sitcoms are at the heart of who Wanda is. It’s how she learned English and her sort of idealized sense of family and her life: all that is intertwined. That’s her psyche. So in looking at an Agatha show, I wanted to do that again. And that’s actually part of where the idea of the prestige crime show at the top, because the question was, ‘If Agatha was going to have her own Meilleur, what would it be?’ And it was a murder show. She would clearly get down with a murder show. So that was the sort of guiding principle: everything about the show needed to complement the woman herself.”

Crossan then asked Schaeffer about putting together the ensemble of the coven. “It was an early idea that we would bring a citizen of Westview on the Witches Road, and it was abundantly clear that it needed to be Mrs. Hart,” Schaeffer said, gesturing to Rupp, who was stealing the spotlight with her facial reactions. “I think that was some of the writers’ favorite work was subjecting poor Mrs. Hart…”

“So the phone call I got,” Rupp interrupted, “was, ‘We’d love you to join this project. You’re going to be a witch!’ I was so excited, and then I get there, I think I’m going to be a witch. Like Debra Jo is going to play a witch. And I get there, and no one is really looking me in the eye. And then it just went downhill from there.”

Crossan of course had to follow up with Rupp and asked her what it was like to return and her favorite part of the experience. “I mean, at my age, you sometimes don’t get to do new exciting things,” Rupp said, serious for a moment. “And this came my way; it was such a gift, with these amazing people. I ate so many peanut butter sandwiches,” she continued, bringing back the humor. “If you can ever work with Jac, it is the luckiest day of your life, because she is something. And Kathryn was our leader. She was just—when you were so tired you wanted to die, she’d just be, ‘Let’s go. Come on. Let’s go!’ And you got up and you went.”

Zamata was next, talking about what excited and interested her about the part. “Being able to show my range,” she said. “I feel very comfortable doing comedy, and I was happy to bring it to the show. But I was so glad to be asked to do more. This character has so much depth and so many layers, and it was so fun to be able to dig into her and find more things that I haven’t been able to express in other projects.”

Crossan moved to Ahn, asking about her final scene. “I think the thing that’s so tragic about Alice’s story is the regret over the potential that was never realized,” she began. “But that’s also life, you know? It’s not a fairy tale. I think the moment of that anger of like, ‘But I just got here! I finally figured it out.’ But the thing that Rio says to her about, ‘but you died doing what you were supposed to do,’, and I think Alice can’t argue with that. It came too soon and sometimes life is shorter than we want it to be. But I think she understands the justice of it. If you’re going to go out, at least go out doing what you’re supposed to do.”

The conversation turned to “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” and its presence throughout the show. “So, the earliest sort of kernel for the design of the show was my hope and my mantra to the writers that the show is a spell,” Schaeffer said. “We wanted the show itself to be a spell, to cast a spell on the audience. As we were sort of trying to figure out how to accomplish that, we were talking about [how] we need to bring a song into it because of the bop that was ‘Agatha All Along’.”

She continued, “We were like, ‘Well, music is a spell, a song is a spell,’ and we just kind of kept unpacking that until it became that not only is the song itself a spell, but it’s actually the con of the show and it is also the main character’s deep emotional truth. So then I went to the Lopezes and was like, ‘So, hey: I need you to write a song that is all of these things and also handles this enormous burden of plot.’ We did have to note the lyrics really meticulously, because it was all tied to the plot and to how we were defining witchcraft and the rules of the world. It was a mind scramble.”

Joe Locke, who played Teen (and wasn’t at the panel), was the next conversation. Crossan asked Hahn about their relationship, both as characters and in real life. “We met at his callback,” she responded. “And when he opened his mouth and we were in a scene together, it was like the molecules in the room just shifted. Looking into his eyes, I felt like I had known him my whole life. I felt very maternal as we were making it. He’s an incredible actor and an incredible scene partner and also just such a self-possessed authentic person.”

The next topic of the panel was the practical side of things: how the Witches’ Road would like like. “Well, there was sort of my early touchstones: like, I am a child of Neverending Story and Dark Crystal and Legend and Labyrinth, and that was the origin. Very early on, we decided the show would be practical. All those examples are practical: puppetry and trees and everything. So that’s sort of where we started.”

“I think there’s some Wizard of Oz in all of us on some deep, weird, unconscious level,” Hahn added. “I always love that feeling of Wizard of Oz where you’re outside but clearly on a sound stage: it kind of feels like a dream. It’s like this weird limbic space that was so trippy and also really affected us all in terms of the spell of the show.”

Hahn spoke next about the character growth of Agnes throughout the show. “It was really following the road map of the scripts. It just felt like getting into the tar of what she had been carrying and why all of that bluff and confidence and sass and meanness is on top. It definitely was getting deeper and deeper towards that last episode where you see what’s underneath it for her.”

She continued, “It’s interesting, because that last episode kills me. I think when you see them in that final scene, I think that there is an acceptance maybe? Just accepting him. Maybe the shame is kind of left a little bit. I think that that’s where I feel her landing: in a place of next steps, which I don’t think she really had seen for herself.”

Crossan followed this up with a question to Schaeffer about why she chose these two characters (Agatha and Teen) to go together. “So, off of WandaVision, one of the things that Kathryn brought to the role and the development of Agatha was like Kathryn really hooked into that what Agatha wanted from Wanda was connection. So what we wanted to do for Agatha in her own show, I felt deeply that Agatha is at her best as a mentor. She mentors all the other witches. She guides them and teaches them. She can’t help but teach. She’s a natural teacher, even though she hates it. So we wanted to have the central relationship to be an opportunity for her to be a mentor.”

They then answered a couple of questions from the audience. One was what character on the show other than their own would they think would be the most fun to play? “I would actually pick Sharon,” Zamata said with a laugh. “Everything Debra Jo did in the show made me laugh so hard, and it looked like you were having a blast. I hope you were,” she said to Rupp. “I was just, ‘She’s having fun over there and I’m thoroughly enjoying this.’”

“Well, Sasheer was always in front of me in the road,” Rupp responded. “I always brought up the rear of the road. So I just made it up in my head that I wanted Sasheer to be my best friend. So you’ll see me: I’ll reach for her and she just swats me away. She didn’t even look at me. So, you know, we had a very special relationship. Sometimes, I’d do things like I’d try to take my shoe off and I’d hop and Sasheer would turn around like, ‘What are you doing?’ and then move on completely in character. Sharon had her own little story going on at the end of the road.”

The next section was about the fans and what they meant to the cast. (Yes, fan art was mentioned.) “It’s really such a git when you create something that has so many layers to it,” said Zamata, “and so many clues and Easter eggs and foreshadowing and the fans were eating it up and putting the pieces together.”

“All your theories were so awesome,” Hahn added.

“You never know as an actor if you’re going to be a part of something that people really connect to in that way,” Ahn said. “So it feels like such an honor and a privilege to tell a story that other people are like, ‘That’s me.’ And to know that you’re a part of something that makes people feel seen is so rare and special.”

This of course led to whether the cast had any favorite fan theories. The main one was Rio being Nicholas’s mom/father. “When we were developing it—we, meaning my executive producer Mary Livanos and I,” Schaeffer started, “we got a lot of questions, ‘Who is the dad?’ And we were like, ‘Why do you want to know?”

She continued, “And then when were were casting Nicky, we were like, ‘Yeah, that kid looks like Aubrey.’ So that was just something that we didn’t want to answer the how’s and why’s of it, because it’s witches. It was just something that was important to the writers and to me and just felt like something special. So it was really lovely that it was something that the fans said that we could confirm.”

You can see the full panel on the Paley Center’s YouTube channel and see all the photos I took on my Flickr (mostly of the red carpet beforehand, and may I editorialize that Kathryn Hahn was such a lady: she made sure to talk to every outlet, even the small ones near the end). Agatha All Along is still available on Disney+, and you can read my reviews of the episodes here on The Geekiary.

Author: Angie Fiedler Sutton

Angie Fiedler Sutton is a writer, podcaster, and all-round fangirl geek. She has been published in Den of Geek, Stage Directions, LA Weekly, The Mary Sue, and others.

She also produces her own podcast, Contents May Vary, where she interviews geeky people about geeky things. You can see all her work (and social media channels) at angiefsutton.com.

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