Patti LuPone in ‘Agatha All Along’ is Marvel’s best acting performance

When Marvel Maniathe grueling, suffocating takeover that has defined much of the last decade of entertainment began, I don’t think a single person would have predicted that the best performance we’d get in an MCU TV series would be from Patti LuPone. It might even have seemed absurd that the Broadway legend, who sets famously high standards for the work she chooses, would even be involved in such a project.

Yet here we are in the following days Agatha All Along delivered the stunning “Death’s Hand in Mine,” still stunned by her tour de force in that episode.

Agatha All Along is, in my opinion, the 23rd MCU TV series. (Give me at least five minutes to take cover before you hit me with “well, actually!” emails.) The range in quality in these shows is as wide as… The Hulk’s shoulder span? (Look, I’m not a full-fledged Marvel person. I’m trying here.) But there’s no doubt that some excellent acting has come from these series, work that is often dismissed because of the genre—a practice I hate!

The particular subset of what is now WandaVision-verse, what a spinoff Agatha All Along is now a part of, has featured some of Marvel’s best performances. Definitely Elisabeth Olsen and Kathryn Hahn, whose turn was so surprising, deliciously wild and uncannily funny that Agatha All Along was built around in the first place.

Still, I love that in this universe of hugely popular superheroes and A-list movie stars leading their own shows, it’s a supporting turn by Patti LuPone as a tarot card-reading witch that people are calling the best MCU TV performance yet. Give Patti LuPone that Emmy nod, people! (Shockingly and unfairly, it would be her first! A world where Patti LuPone has no Emmy nominations is not a world I want to live in! What is griefbut love being unreachable again because Patti is nameless?!)

(Update: I’ve been reminded that LuPone has a guest actress nomination for Phrases. She didn’t win, so if you follow this troublesome reference to WandaVision quote, the grief continues.)

The best episode of the season centers on LuPone’s character Lilia revealing her backstory.

The episode jumps back and forth in time, fittingly for an episode focusing on a witch with a talent for seeing the future. Sometimes we are with her as she learns her craft centuries ago. Sometimes we return to her confused state of mind mere seconds before.

Despite having just been betrayed by Teen (Joe Locke), her unmooring kaleidoscope of memories points her toward her calling: She must continue to the next trial, help Teen and Agatha, and take Jen (Sasheer Zamata) with her to reunite the coven.

The patchwork of flashbacks serve to make sense of her erratic behavior, which had been dismissed as just another crazy fortune-telling witch. But it also serves to fully piece together who Lilia is, a witch who wasn’t sure what her life has meant or could mean because it’s always been presented to her in disarray. LuPone is fantastic in these scenes, mourning an existence that may have seemed purposeless and overwhelmed by her eventual realization of what purpose is.

As she reads tarot cards that will save the witches and allow them to continue on The Witches’ Road, she realizes herself. She draws a Queen of Cups and reveals herself to be an “empathic, intuitive, inner voice you can trust.” The Three of Pentacles indicates what has been missing: a covenant, which she now has. The Knight of Wands represents her past as a fighting spirit.

Each card is a moving tribute to the strength of a witch who had been crippled by self-confidence. LuPone’s portrayal of discovery and emotion is heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time, a masterclass in subtlety—all delivered wearing a cheesy Glinda the Good Witch costume your Halloween-obsessed friend bought at a mall costume shop . (We can’t get into all the plot details here…)

To say more would spoil. But for a genre filled with hero’s journeys of all kinds, Lilias in this episode is my favorite yet. And my old gay self here waxing poetic about a wild episode of a Marvel series, of all things? Well, that just reflects the message of the episode itself: Never underestimate the power of Patti LuPone.