Agatha All Along Isn’t Aubrey Plaza’s First Unhinged Marvel Performance

This post contains spoilers for “Agatha All Along” (as well as FX’s “Legion”).

In a series full of fun, intriguing, and camp-infused performances, Aubrey Plaza stands out as the most delightfully unpredictable member of the “Agatha All Along” ensemble. Her character is Rio Vidal, otherwise known as the black heart on Agatha’s (Kathryn Hahn) list and the green witch in her coven. Her purpose so far seems to be to annoy and turn Agatha on in equal measure, all the while threatening to derail the entire expedition down the Witches’ Road with her rather mercenary predisposition. Her strategy, thanks to Plaza’s super-game performance, is to be equal parts weird, sexy, and borderline inhuman, and to revel in the discomfort her attractive monstrousness inspires in all the other witches.

Take, for example, the scene at the beginning of episode 4, when the coven summons Rio. While they’re waiting in solemn silence for their green witch to appear, Rio bursts her arms up through the earth behind them, crawling out of the ground like a zombie, complete with the herky-jerky motions of a Deadite from Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” franchise. Given that Raimi directed the film whose controversial writing choices “Agatha All Along” has to grapple with, it’s a fitting image that Plaza sells well. While the witches bicker and scream, Rio snaps her body back into place, whipping her dirt-covered head up and declaring, “I heard you guys were having a party.” She does a dance-step towards Agatha, popping her eyes wide open to unnerve her (apparent) ex before revealing a green leaf in her palm, as if by magic. Plaza’s Rio is chaotic, she’s cool, and right off the bat, she reminds us of someone.

Plaza has committed to plenty of gleefully intense performances that walk the line between unnerving and intriguing. She’s been the desperate stalker protagonist of “Ingrid Goes West,” the self-possessed, relentless sex comedy heroine of “The To-Do List,” and the enigmatic main character (for a time) in Lawrence Michael Levine’s tripped-out meta-horror film “Black Bear.” Many Aubrey Plaza characters possess a razor-sharp edge or walk on one, but her Rio doesn’t remind me of any of those mentioned above. Instead, she calls to mind another Marvel wildcard, and another performance that’s imbued with a perfectly expressed sense of physical unpredictability and mental ferociousness: the devil on David Haller’s shoulder in “Legion,” Lenny Busker.

From 2017 to 2019, “Fargo” adaptation creator Noah Hawley took a circuitous route to telling an X-Men-adjacent story on FX’s “Legion.” Hawley used all the cinematic tricks in the book to elevate “Legion” beyond typical superhero adaptation status, evoking horror and sci-fi classics to craft a dazzling show (the first season, especially, is a standout) that always relished the opportunity to go more than a little bit off the deep end. That tone was set from the very first episode by Plaza’s Lenny, a multiplicitous character who at first appeared to be the zany partner in crime to Dan Stevens’ David, but was soon revealed to be a hallucination of his dead friend and ultimately unmasked as a parasitic, evil mutant from the X-Men comics.

As Lenny, Plaza possessed an uncanny, hypnotic sense of physicality, using every part of her body and face to express the character’s exuberantly off-kilter nature and to hint at the depths of Lenny’s true power. In the role, Plaza had the ability to, from one moment to the next, call to mind a femme fatale, a silent movie star, a devilish, grinning Jack Nicholson villain, or a wild animal. In one of the first season’s most memorable scenes, a “Twin Peaks”-recalling shot of pie on the ground gives way to a remix of “Feelin’ Good,” which plays while Plaza’s character reveals her character’s wilder side. She slinks around a hospital ward, leaving bright red impressions on the screen, and when no one’s looking, she starts thrusting wildly on a dentist’s chair and sipping on an oxygenated (or perhaps laughing gas-filled) mask like it’s a martini. In another scene, she takes on the air of a silent film monster, cutting a stark profile against a glowing hallway when her dark form appears following a title card that reads: “THE MONSTER ARRIVES!”

Rewatching this scene, which fans quickly dubbed the “Boléro” sequence after the Maurice Revel song Jemaine Clements’ character conducts out of thin air, it makes very little sense. Without the show’s strange, creative context and the dizzying sense of joy that came with seeing it for the first time, it’s mostly a mash-up of compelling and deeply absurd sights and sounds. Yet despite the fact that nearly every part of the famous “Legion” scene would seem inexplicable to newcomers to the series, Plaza’s big moments still go off like gangbusters. She holds the camera and audience enthralled, appearing in a disheveled suit with a huge mess of hair, a slouched yet inherently musical gait, and an exaggerated, strung-out makeup look. She’s a fever dream version of Beetlejuice by way of an old Universal horror movie — equally capable of scaring viewers as she is in inspiring profound cinematic obsession in them.

“Legion” is technically a Marvel property (one that’s distinctly outside the MCU, having premiered just a month before Disney acquired FX’s parent company 21st Century Fox), but I’m not here to tell you that Rio Vidal is somehow Lenny Busker or Amahl Farouk — far from it. Yet, Plaza’s character in “Agatha All Along” incorporates echoes of her past performance in a way that’s thrilling and also bodes well for the show. With her full-body performance, Plaza gives viewers a sense of tremendous potential energy; we get the feeling that she might jump out of her skin or transform into some otherworldly thing at any moment. As an MCU series, every moment of “Agatha All Along” is going to be dissected to death by hungry fans who want to guess at the show’s big mysteries. In the midst of so much rigid, well-rehearsed deconstruction, it’s amazing to see a performance that’s bold and bizarre purely for the sake of being bold and bizarre. (Hahn’s nuanced yet camp take on Agatha deserves a shout-out here, too.)

Plaza’s character first appears as an FBI agent in Agatha’s “Mare of Easttown” fantasy, but Rio really makes her grand entrance at that episode’s ending, when she bursts through Agatha’s living room wall in a scene that’s as high-octane and homoerotic as all the best bits of “Killing Eve.” Plaza plays Rio as someone who’s as likely to kiss Agatha as kill her, and you get the sense that for her, the two might be equally flattering acts. She also at times feels like an extension of Agatha’s own morally blurry mind — just as Lenny once was for David in “Legion.”

In the show’s pilot episode, after a chemistry-laden showdown, Rio tells Agatha that her black heart beats for her, and — in a deeply horny moment that feels as far from Marvel TV as anything I’ve ever seen — licks the witch’s bloodied hand in place of a goodbye. She’s far and away one of the most feral characters Marvel has ever presented on TV, in both the literal and too-online sense of the word. Rio’s glorious, alluring-and-out-of-control quality bridges the gap between the more tightly monitored MCU proper and its messier, more subversive offshoots, including this show’s controversial cousin, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Of course, Hawley’s “Legion” may have been the most subversive and strange Marvel show of all, and even though the company closed the book on its specific brand of weirdness with its ending in 2019, some of that off-script wildness clearly lives on in Plaza’s performance. Whether she’s channeling Beetlejuice or Villanelle, acting as a dark guardian angel or a double-crossing devil, Plaza makes the world of Marvel feel more deliciously unstable –- and unexpected, and entertaining, and (dare I say) dangerous -– each and every moment she’s on screen.

New episodes of “Agatha All Along” premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.