Why Wanda Doesn’t Have Her Accent in ‘WandaVision’
The premise of Marvel’s WandaVision is full of mysteries. How is Vision alive again after the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame? Why are they living these strange recreations of vintage TV sitcoms? Have they been kidnapped? Are they being manipulated? And hey: Where is Wanda Maximoff’s Sokovian accent?
If it’s been a few years since you watched Wanda’s first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, you might not remember that she has a really thick accent in the film. Wanda and her brother Pietro are from the made-up European country of Sokovia, and so they each share a “Sokovian” accent. You can hear it clearly in this scene.
In later movies, Wanda’s accent was diminished. I WandaVision, it’s completely gone — she sounds like an American sitcom star from the 1950s. So what happened?
Elizabeth Olsen actually addressed this question — and insisted it’s not a plot hole — in an interview with Collider. She said that while you can’t hear Wanda’s accent on WandaVision, that doesn’t mean it’s gone. Her full quote:
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.
Olsen had previously stated that working with Black Widow on how to be a spy had helped her lose a lot of her Sokovian accent, hence it was barely present in Captain America: Civil War and later Avengers movies. She also told Collider that the Sokovia accent was invented by her and Aaron Taylor-Johnson with their dialect coach on Age of Ultron “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.”
Our guess? The same magic that’s creating this strange sitcom world also erased the remains of Wanda’s accent. The change could be permanent or, if and when Wanda and Vision get out of their sitcom land, she could regain her natural voice. (Olsen even says it’s “not gone.”)
New episodes of WandaVision premiere on Disney+ on Fridays.
Gallery — The Coolest Marvel Easter Eggs in WandaVision So Far: