Why Scarlet Witch’s Accent Is Missing In ‘WandaVision’
After the success of the first two episodes of WandaVision that premiered January 15th on Disney+, many Marvel fans across the world have been expressing how they are pretty frustrated, upset, and confused with tons of questions on how Wanda Maximoff suddenly lost her Sokovian accent with which she was introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
It has been previously explained by Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors behind Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame, that Wanda no longer had her distinct accent. Their explanation on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast is below:
“We have intentionally tried to strip that accent away from a couple of reasons. One if you’ll notice at the beginning of Civil War that Black Widow is training her to be a spy, and two is she’s been on the run, and one of the most distinguish characteristics that she has is her accent.”
Despite their explanation, Wanda’s accent is still is not present afterward in WandaVision, although in the first episode of the series, there were explicit references to the fact that she’s European and Sokovian.
Actress Elizabeth Olsen, who portrayed Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch since her debut in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, was asked about the loss of Wanda’s accent and said that it is lost but Wanda still has it. When this topic was addressed to Elizabeth Olsen in a recent episode of Collider Ladies Night, she stated that it “hasn’t gone anywhere” and further implied that Wanda hides it, especially in WandaVision:
“She is playing the role of being in an American sitcom. So, the Sokovia accent was created by me and Aaron and our dialect coach because it’s a fake country and we could find different sources of Slavic sounds. And we wanted to make sure it didn’t sound Russian because Black Widow speaks Russian, and so we just needed to sound more like Slovakian. So we created these sound changes that worked for Aaron’s British accent going to Slovakia basically and my American accent so that we sounded related."
It seems like Elizabeth Olsen implied that Wanda has not lost her Sokovian accent but is hiding it well in WandaVision.
“And then all of sudden, all these different characters had to speak it in different films. So the Sokovian accent took a lot of time. It hasn’t gone anywhere. There have been reasons for everything. It lightened up when she started living in the States, and in WandaVision she is playing the role of being in an American sitcom and so it’s not gone. It is absolutely still there.”
Elizabeth Olsen insists that Wanda has not lost her Sokovian accent, which means Marvel fans across the world can expect to hear her Sokovian accent again soon. Perhaps down the line in WandaVision's upcoming episodes when she is presumably out of her limbo, or in any future MCU films that may feature her. All the reasons Elizabeth Olsen gave seem consistent with what Joe and Anthony Russo said. We may not know why she is still hiding her accent, but maybe she has just been living in the States for a while. It is something we may have to wait for to find out.
WandaVision is now streaming with new episode drops every Friday on Disney+.
Source(s): The Direct