Hayley Atwell could do this all day — which, in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, ended up being a much shorter day than she probably imagined.
Atwell reprised her role of Peggy Carter in the Doctor Strange sequel as one of the alternate-universe versions of some of Marvel’s most recognizable superheroes. Her Captain Carter, who hailed from an alternate universe where Peggy got the super serum, was a member of the multiverse-monitoring organization The Illuminati. But despite the hype surrounding the cameos, which included Anson Mount as Black Bolt, Lashana Lynch as Captain Marvel, John Krasinski as Reed Richards, and Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, the excitement was cut short by the brutal murder of all the characters. Captain Carter had an especially grisly and ironic death when she was cut in half by her own shield.
“Multiverse of Madness was kind of wild. It was such a weird cameo to do,” Atwell tells Inverse in an interview for her newest film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Atwell acknowledges that her appearance might have disappointed fans of Peggy, who first appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger and became so beloved she got to lead her own short-lived TV series, ABC’s Agent Carter. In fact, she knows it was disappointing because people have told her to her face it was “lame.”
“When she says ‘I could do this all day,’ people were like, ‘Haha, but you didn’t cause you got sliced in half by a Frisbee!’ And so I got a lot of, ‘Hah, she’s lame because of that.’ And yeah, maybe she wasn’t as taken care of in that movie as she could have been,” Atwell says.
But Atwell was still excited to wear the Captain Carter outfit after only voicing the character in What If. “I would love it to have been live, but it was not,” Atwell says of the Disney+ animated show. But she got her wish to play Captain Carter in live-action, even if it was just for a brief, bloody moment. Despite how “lame” it might have been, Atwell has no regrets.
“It was great to have her in that outfit. It was great to have her with that shield. And I loved doing that.”
