Marvel’s What If…? Creators Talk Peggy Carter’s MCU Future

2016 was an emotional rollercoaster for those Marvel fans who were wondering if ABC’s Hayley Atwell-led Agent Carter would be back for a third season. Though hopes were high that Peggy would return to the small screen for more post-war adventures in Agent Carter Season 3, the network called time on the show in May of that year, and people have been yelling for more ever since.

Atwell would go on to briefly appear as the beloved character again in the concluding part of Marvel’s Infinity Saga, Avengers: Endgame, but upcoming animated Disney+ series What If…? would then give Atwell a chance to join the new Marvel multiverse by lending her voice to a Variant version of Peggy Carter who receives the super soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers – becoming “Captain Carter.”

If you can’t get enough of Captain Carter when the first season of What If…? arrives this month, you can just go ahead and rejoice, because the creators of the show are hoping to feature her in future seasons, too.

“We knew we wanted to make Peggy Carter the first Avenger…What’s the change that would actually make this possible?” head writer AC Bradley tells our own Don Kaye. “And what it is, is a woman stays in the room. Peggy has always been ahead of her time, so let’s showcase that in the 1940s.”

Critical reactions to the series’ multiversal approach, which uses Loki’s universe-shattering finale as a springboard, have been overwhelmingly positive as the streaming series gears up to launch, and it looks like What If Season 2 will explore the possibilities of the no-longer-sacred MCU timeline in an even deeper way.

“A lot of the season one episodes are riffing off certain points in the cinematic universe and maybe even delving in a certain phase, but we need to expand and explore more things, so we had to come up with other ideas that were a little further down the timeline,” director Bryan Andrews says, later adding “Peggy Carter is pretty awesome; Captain Carter is pretty awesome, we’d love to see more of her.”

It’s a sentiment that Bradley agrees with.

“I think we’ve all grown really attached to these new versions [of the characters],” Bradley says. “Hopefully we will get to see more of Peggy Carter being Captain Carter.”

Of course Marvel fans were delighted to find out that Peggy Carter would be featured in the new series – albeit in animated form – when it was announced, but could her ongoing presence in What If…? finally lead to a live-action MCU movie for Atwell?

“The fan reaction has been so tremendous,” Andrews says. “It would be amazing to see more of her in any which way, whether it’s What If…? or if it’s her own big live-action movie. It’s like, hell yeah!”

Atwell has been busy on other high octane live-action projects of late, co-starring in two back-to-back Mission: Impossible films alongside Tom Cruise and Guardians of the Galaxy star Pom Klementieff. But the actress has often been asked about returning to the role of Peggy Carter, and seems open to the idea as long as she would be doing “something new” with the character.

What If…?’s Captain Carter is certainly something new, but we hope we haven’t seen the last of her in the live-action MCU.

In addition to Atwell, Marvel’s What If…? features the voices of Tom Hiddleston Andy Serkis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benicio Del Toro, Chris Hemsworth, Clark Gregg, Jeff Goldblum, Jeremy Renner, Kurt Russell, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Douglas, Jon Favreau, Josh Brolin, Karen Gillan, Kat Dennings, Paul Bettany, Paul Rudd, Sebastian Stan, Seth Green, Taika Waititi, Tilda Swinton, and Natalie Portman – among a host of other MCU vets. It will begin streaming via Disney+ on August 11.

We’ll have more from Bryan Andrews on What If…? in the coming days!