‘Lilia, oh Lilia!’ Patti LuPone on her ‘Agatha All Along’ witch and ‘getting in trouble’ for spoiling Marvel secrets
Patti LuPone recently joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Disney+'s Agatha All Along, in which she plays a 450-year-old Sicilian witch named Lilia Calderu. "Lilia, oh Lilia! Will you be my Lilia? Oh Lilia, the tattooed lady!" LuPone exclaims in a sing-song manner during her recent sit-down with Gold Derby, demonstrating her passion for talking about this character. "Lilia Calderu, yeah. I didn't have an accent in this one. You'd think I would have."
The three-time Tony winner for Evita, Gypsy, and Company readily admits she knew "absolutely nothing" about the MCU before signing on to the project, which also stars Kathryn Hahn (reprising her Emmy-nominated role from WandaVision), Joe Locke, Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp. "I don't know a lot about nothing. That's how I live my life," she chuckles. "When we were shooting this, I don't think any of us felt as if we were in the Marvel world because we were our own entity at Trilith Studio ... we were alone."
LuPone shares a moment from behind the scenes in Atlanta that aligns perfectly with the show's themes of magic and wonder. "Sasheer and Joe and I did something pretty remarkable toward the end of the shoot," LuPone recounts. Her landlady took them to the countryside, where the woods were absolutely filled with fireflies. "These fireflies hover low on the ground and start to synchronize their tail lights together. It was a trip. There we were in the dark, in the middle of Atlanta, and this was happening, some fabulous National Geographic moment."
The actress felt a special connection with Lilia since they're both of Sicilian heritage. "[Playwright] David Mamet said this to me once: 'Everything is as it should be. The universe is unfolding.' And in this particular case, the universe was unfolding for me." LuPone couldn't believe the parallel between Lilia and her American Horror Story: NYC role of Kathy Pizazz, who were both tarot card readers. "I've always thought I had a witch ability," she confesses. "I have precognizance. All of us have something that is of the earth and extra normal. We just don't recognize it."
Lilia's final scene on Agatha All Along involved her falling through the air, staring up at the camera, which LuPone reveals was done using practical effects. "I was in a harness, basically, and the table was rigged. I was holding onto the table, and when they told me to release, I fell, [however] not that far." She praises the show's behind-the-scenes artisans for all of their incredible work, noting, "I'm a proponent of craft. You worry about AI. You worry about CGI. You worry about all that stuff that will take away the human ability to create magic, and these guys were amazing."
Reading the scripts, LuPone was initially "very" confused when her character's mind started floating through different points of time. She explains about her "incredible" showrunner, "Jac Schaeffer writes a puzzle, and I wish that I had served her better. Because the answers from my [7th] episode were all in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And I didn't necessarily, in the moment, understand the bops," i.e. the brief glimpses into other timelines. "I did ask a lot of questions, but I keep saying I must have forgotten the answers."
The Marvel universe is quite strict about spoilers, and LuPone laughs that she's "not at all" good about keeping secrets. "I keep getting in trouble. If someone tells me a secret, I gotta tell somebody!" For example, while the rest of the cast knew in advance about the show's victory at the GLAAD Awards, they decided to keep it from LuPone. "Jac said, 'We knew, we just couldn't tell you, because you can't keep a secret,'" she recalls.
Reflecting on her time filming Agatha All Along with the cast, LuPone tells us, "It was one of — if not the — best experiences in my career. We're still on the same text thread that I believe we started while we were working." If she were to receive an Emmy nomination for the role, it'd be the third of her career, following her Primetime Emmy bid for Frasier (1998) and her Daytime Emmy nod for The Song Spinner (1996).
Also in our exclusive video interview, LuPone talks about which former time period she'd love to go back and visit, and what it was like starring on Broadway in The Roommate when her costar Mia Farrow got sick and had to be replaced at the last moment.
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