Though she was first introduced in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier post-credit scene, we really meet Wanda Maximoff in Avengers Age of Ultron. Wanda and her brother Pietro are being held in a Hydra facility in the fictional country of Sokovia where Baron Wolfgang von Strucker is experimenting on them with Loki's scepter. Both Wanda and Pietro have Easter European accents, which they created specifically for these characters.
Pietro dies in the battle against Ultron, and Wanda goes on to become a member of the Avengers, appearing in Captain America: Civil War (with her accent). But, after Civil War, when we see her in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Wanda's accent is mysteriously gone.
Here is how Wanda actress Elizabeth Olsen has described what happened to the accent:
“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. And then all of a sudden, all these different characters had to speak it in different films. [Laughs] 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.”Certainly stranger things have happened in the MCU that require us to suspend disbelief, but this accent suddenly vanishing has bothered fans for years. The Russo brothers, who directed Infinity War and Endgame, once said that Wanda intentionally dropped the accent because she was training to be a spy and the accent would give her away. So, what is it? Is she hiding her accent? Did she lose it? Is it some sort of combination of them both?
Well, the mystery of Wanda's accent has only gotten stranger in WandaVision. In the show's fifth episode, when Wanda confronts S.W.O.R.D. agents outside of her bubble, she suddenly has her accent back. No one seems to notice or acknowledge the accent. But in Episode Six, it's addressed directly. Wanda and Pietro (now played by Evan Peters) are having a bit of a tiff. Wanda asks him: "What happened to your accent?"
"What happened to yours?" Pietro fires back. "Details are fuzzy, man. I got shot like a chump in the street for no reason at all. And the next thing I know I hear you calling me."
It's also worth noting that Wanda does briefly use the accent in Episode Three when she says Pietro's name. So why is it coming and going like this? Is the accent something that she is intentionally suppressing, like she is with other emotions? Does the accent remind her of her brother and the pain of his loss, so she chooses to hide it like she is the loss of Vision?
Esquire
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