No stranger to rabid fan bases in genre television, Emma Caulfield, who plays Dottie on Marvel Studios' WandaVision, is reveling in the various fan theories that have sprung up during the show's nine-episode run.
"Obviously I knew what the truth was, and I couldn't say anything," Caulfield told Cheddar regarding speculation about her character running rampant on social media. "These are all so good, and I wish that some of these were actually true."
The veteran actress, who also once starred as a demon-turned-human character in the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even issued a tongue-in-cheek plea to Kevin Feige, who runs the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to make more of those fan-derived storylines come to pass.
"Dear Kevin, what can I get you for Christmas?" she added with a laugh.
Without giving away the ending for the series, which is now completely available on Disney+ after a traditional run of weekly episode drops, Caulfield's Dottie is one of the significant residents of Westview, New Jersey, the setting for superhero Wanda Maximoff to seemingly living vicariously through TV sitcoms that magically envelop the town. The episodes of the streaming show correspondingly pay homage to classic broadcast staples that run the gamut from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Modern Family.
Caulfield noted that emulating some of those earlier TV aesthetics was part of the fun challenge of creating the series.
"Getting the period correct, making sure that the voice and the body language and all that stuff was spot on, the technical aspects of that, that was the most actor-y good stuff that you get to do," she said.
Offering up that the work environment was supportive to take on those challenges, Caulfield took time to praise dialect coach Courtney Young, as well as WandaVision showrunner and her previous collaborator on the film Timer, Jac Schaeffer.
"She's just this wonderfully supportive, hilarious, gifted person," Caulfield said of Schaeffer. "I would read the phone book for her if she wanted me to."
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