It was no mystery that fans thought the Illuminati was underused in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and apparently one star agrees with them—Hayley Atwell a.k.a. Captain Peggy Carter.
Talking to the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Variety), Atwell expresses how she thought her character was underused in the Doctor Strange sequel. She says, “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.”
For context, Atwell made a cameo as an alternate version of Captain America called Captain Carter who served as a member of a council that oversees the multiverse called the Illuminati. When the Scarlet Witch attacks the Illuminati HQ, she makes quick work of the members, cutting Captain Carter in half with her shield.
if it’s any consolation, none of the Illuminati characters were given a proper time to shine since they were mostly just there to be cameos. If one Illuminati member got the spotlight, it was definitely Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, who even had a mindscape battle with Wanda—which he still ultimately lost.
Though Captain Carter may have only had minutes of screentime in MoM, her full fleshed out alternate timeline is explained in the animated Marvel’s What If…? on Disney+. It’s unclear if that’s the same Carter that got killed in the film, but there is definitely room for her to come back in the future.
We don’t know if we’ll see Captain Carter again in the future, but you can check out her full story in Marvel’s What If…? now streaming on Disney+.
