After several years of expressing interest in reprising the role, British actress Hayley Atwell revealed this past weekend she’s now hesitant to take on the role of Peggy Carter again for Marvel Studios.
Atwell played the role in the first two Captain America movies and briefly in Ant-Man, and notably starred in the title role in ABC’s short-lived Agent Carter TV series. Appearing at a Q&A panel at ACE Comic Con Seattle on Sunday, Atwell says if she were to come back to the character it would have to take a different approach:
“I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to play a beloved character for so long, as is. It’s very unusual. I wouldn’t have thought starting off in my career that that would happen. You do one character for however many months and then you go and do the next. So I think it’s an unusual position to be in – it would be very unusual to have the choice to do that again.
I think the main thing, though, is if it were – if there were interest in Netflix or in her being in a film or something – that it would have to feel… it would have to feel right. I wouldn’t want to go over old ground. It would have to be new, there would have to be higher production values so she could do more. I’d have to feel like it’s not just, you know, ‘a case a week with Peggy Carter.’
If she’s had an impact on audiences, let that impact grow, so it delights them, but I think it should be to do with more of the current climate now. What are smart issues to bring up? How to create any sort of kind of social weight, an emotional kind of gravitas to the show.
So I think on the principle of it, if somebody approached me with it, I would be appropriately kind of tentative about it. Because I would go, ‘well, but, you’ve got to convince me of why we need this, and what for, and how is this a development of the two seasons that we’ve done?’ So that’s more of the question — I’d just want to do something new with her.”
Fans have petitioned for Netflix to resurrect Agent Carter over the years, while critical appraisal of the show has only grown with time – some now citing it as the best thing Marvel’s TV division has done to date.
