Who Are The Commercial Actors In WandaVision?
WandaVision, Marvel's compelling and genuinely weird new Disney+ series about Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), takes the form of an old-time sitcom in which the pair of Avengers are the stars — and seem to be trapped inside, held by some mysterious force. WandaVision is so dedicated to recreating the feel of an old broadcast show that each episode includes a commercial break, in which a pair of actors hawk an in-world product that connects the show to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In the first episode, the product is a toaster called the ToastMate 2000, made by Stark Industries, and bears a resemblance to a terrible item from Wanda's past, the unexploded mortar round, and the toaster's blinking red light is like a bomb preparing to blow. The toaster's ominous tagline is "Forget the past, this is your future."
The second episode's commercial is for a Strücker watch, which also has an ominous slogan: "He'll make time for you." The watch bears the name and insignia of the evil organization HYDRA. "Strücker" and "HYDRA" are references to HYDRA agent Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann), whose cruel experiments gave Wanda and her late twin brother Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) their powers and added to the lifetime of trauma she's experienced.
Below, we'll try to provide the answer to both forms of the question "who are the commercial actors in WandaVision?" There's the easy part of who the actors are in real life — they are, fittingly, actors with extensive experience acting in commercials — and the more difficult question of who they really are within whatever is really happening in WandaVision.
Victoria Blade is "Commercial Woman"
The woman in WandaVision's commercials is played by Victoria Blade, an actress and singer-songwriter who probably auditions for a lot of the same roles as The Boys' Colby Minifie. Blade's career has been gathering steam in the past few years, and WandaVision is her most notable role so far.
According to IMDb, Blade appeared in three series in 2020, The Outsider, Sistas, and Brockmire. Her most prominent role was on the final season of Brockmire, the underrated IFC comedy in which Hank Azaria plays a washed-up baseball announcer. She was the voice of Limón, an Amazon Alexa-style digital assistant that achieves sentience and tries to take over the world, and also appeared in person as a Limón corporate executive. On the film side, she had a small role in the horror movie Antebellum as a hostess at a restaurant.
Blade is also a member of the club of actors who have appeared in both Marvel and DC projects – and is the only one who has been in black-and-white in both of them. She had a very small role as a townsperson in the "Bass Reeves, the Black Marshal of Oklahoma" show-within-a-show on Watchmen. She also appeared in color on an episode of Doom Patrol, another DC show.
Ithamar Enriquez is "Commercial Man"
The man in the commercials is played by Ithamar Enriquez, a working actor who has been in dozens of shows and movies, according to IMDb, and it's fair to call WandaVision his most notable role so far as well, though he's had small parts in some of the biggest TV comedies of the past decade-plus. He played a paramedic who saves Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) from dying of appendicitis in the "Tallahassee" episode of The Office. He made two appearances on Key & Peele as a high school principal, including the hilarious "High on Potenuse" sketch. He popped up in the first Netflix season of Arrested Development, the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in two episodes of A Series of Unfortunate Events. He's played a doctor on Bless This Mess, How to Get Away with Murder, and Teachers. His most notable movie role was in Lady Bird as Lady Bird's (Saorise Ronan) driving instructor.
Enriquez's background is in sketch comedy, and he's an instructor at the Hollywood location of the famous Second City comedy school and theater. He's the creator of Ithamar Has Nothing to Say, a silent, mime-esque sketch concept that started as a one-man stage show and became a YouTube series.
Who are the commercial actors within WandaVision?
There is already a great theory about the significance of the commercial actors within the reality of WandaVision: that they probably only exist within Wanda's mind, because the sitcom world is some kind of projection or simulation or mind-prison for the powerful psychic. Under this theory, the characters themselves are drawn from a very painful memory in Wanda's tragic backstory.
"Call me crazy, I think the people in the commercials are Wanda and Pietro's parents," writes Reddit user thatonekidemmet in a discussion thread about WandaVision on the Marvel Studios subreddit. (The quote has been edited for grammar.) "Makes sense they'd be the same people in each episode, and linked to her trauma. As far as I know they've never been shown before."
As the story goes, Wanda and Pietro's parents died horrifically when the twins were 10; a mortar round hit the Sokovian family's apartment building, killing the parents and forcing the children to take cover under a bed. While they hid, terrified, in the rubble of their home, a second mortar shell hit the building and landed a few feet in front of them but didn't explode. So they hid there, staring at the explosive and its "Stark Industries" logo, for two days, waiting for it to go off and kill them. It didn't, and at that point they vowed to get revenge on Tony Stark, whom they blamed for their parents' death. Their anger led them to volunteer for HYDRA's experiments, bringing them in contract with Strucker; his experiments gave them their respective abilities and eventually led Wanda to her current predicament.
The commercials could very well be psychological manifestations of Wanda's memories, and the actors in them might be avatars of her formative trauma. Or they might not be! It's too early to say for sure. More will be revealed as WandaVision progresses.