Avengers: Infinity War: Why Scarlet Witch Doesn't Have An Accent
Contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers: Infinity War left fans with a ton of questions, mostly of the "will my favorite hero be resurrected in Avengers 4?" variety. But some viewers were also plagued by a smaller but still significant query: Why doesn't Scarlet Witch have an accent in the film?
When actress Elizabeth Olsen made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as Wanda Maximoff in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, she had a discernible Eastern European accent. Olsen's Scarlet Witch popped up again in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, where she spoke with a half-Eastern European, half-American lilt. By the time Avengers: Infinity War rolled around two years later, her accent was completely gone, sending Marvel fans into a serious state of confusion.
Thankfully, Infinity War co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo cleared the air and explained what happened to Scarlet Witch's accent, revealing that there were a number of reasons why she lost it.
As they detailed on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, "We have intentionally tried to strip that accent away for a couple of reasons. One is you'll notice at the beginning of Civil War that Black Widow [Scarlett Johansson] is training her to be a spy, and two is she's been on the run, and one of the most distinguishing characteristics that she has is her accent. So if you're gonna try to disguise yourself or hide yourself or not be caught, you're going to try to limit those trigger warnings that would make it easy for someone to identify you, which would be inclusive of her accent. Clearly Black Widow as a red head is an incredibly distinguishing characteristic for her, which is why she has blonde hair. Cap, we've seen Chris Evans walk around in public with a beard and no one recognizes him. There are simple things you can do to your appearance that take about 90 percent of your visibility away, and for us it was very intentional that we would just keep stripping that accent down to show her acclimating and hiding."
Though this likely isn't the shock-horror explanation that some fans might have been holding out for, it's the one that makes the most sense — and makes Olsen's job a little bit easier. (Hey, nailing a foreign accent isn't easy!)