Hayley Atwell will earn a whole new legion of fans this weekend with her scene-stealing role in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”.
However, Atwell is quite familiar to many audiences for her role as Peggy Carter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – a part she played across multiple films along with two seasons of ABC’s “Agent Carter” series.
She also lent her voice to an alternate version of Peggy in Marvel’s Disney+ animated series “What If?” before bringing a similar version of the character, dubbed ‘Captain Carter’, to the big screen with a cameo in Sam Raimi’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”.
The character briefly appeared in one key sequence of the film, only to be very quickly killed off (and rather brutally) by the film’s villain Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). In a new interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Atwell says that cameo was frustrating:
“I’m like, ‘That wasn’t my choice!’. When she was like, ‘I could do this all day’ and then followed by she’s immediately cut in half by a frisbee. And the audience being like, ‘She can’t do it all day. Apparently you can’t, so, egg on your face.’ That doesn’t really serve Peggy very well.”
Atwell adds her voice role experience on “What If?” was far more rewarding than that cameo:
“I felt like I had much more to do in the ‘What If…?’ animation series. I mean, any actor will tell you, to be able to go into a booth in effectively your pajamas and do an animation is great fun because you’re focused on the voice as the instrument and your main performative tool…[by contrast], it felt like a frustrating moment in ‘Strange.’”
Atwell was one of several cameo actors killed off by Scarlet Witch alongside actors like John Krasinski, Lashana Lynch, Anson Mount and Patrick Stewart.
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is now playing nationwide in cinemas.