Elizabeth Olsen first played Scarlet Witch with a thick accent from the fictional Sokovia, though she’s slowly lost it

Hey, what happened to Wanda’s accent?

That’s the question Marvel fans have been asking for years after Elizabeth Olsen made her debut as Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff with a thick accent, only to lose it slowly by the time WandaVision premiered on Disney+ last week.

While Marvel directors Joe and Anthony Russo have addressed the disappearing accent, originally set to be from the fictional Sokovia in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Olsen gave a more open-ended answer to Collider about the future of the accent.

“The Sokovia accent was created by me and Aaron [Taylor-Johnson] and our dialect coach because it’s a fake country and we could find different sources of Slavic sounds,” Olsen said. “We wanted to make sure it didn’t sound Russian because Black Widow speaks Russian, and so we just needed to sound more like Slovakian. So we created these sound changes… And then all of a sudden, all these different characters had to speak it in different films.”

But the difficulty of the accent doesn’t mean it’s going away forever.

“The Sokovian accent took a lot of time. It hasn’t gone anywhere. There have been reasons for everything. It lightened up when she started living in the States, and in WandaVision she is playing the role of being in an American sitcom and so it’s not gone. It is absolutely still there,” Olsen explained.

The Russo brothers had a similar explanation, pointing out that the accent slightly disappearing matched with Wanda becoming a spy.

“One is you’ll notice at the beginning of Civil War that Black Widow 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,” they explained in 2018.

WandaVision, exploring the relationship between Wanda and Paul Bettany’s Vision, is streaming on Disney+ now as the first of several Marvel series planned.