Marvel’s Agatha Turned Down by Miriam Margolyes

Not many people are in a position to turn down Marvel, but Miriam Margolyes isn’t most people.

The actress, who’s best known for playing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies, recently revealed how she refused a role on Marvel’s upcoming supernatural series, Agatha.

“They contacted me and said, ‘we’re doing a story about witches’. I thought, ‘oh god, not witches again, because I’ve done that with Harry Potter’,” Margolyes tells news.com.au.

It wasn’t just the content that put her off, though. The actress also didn’t fancy shooting in Atlanta, Georgia. “I don’t like America and I didn’t want to be in Georgia for four months,” she admitted.

As a result, she requested a massive salary from Marvel. “So I just said, ‘well, I want a million pounds’ and they said, ‘you can have half a million’, and I said, ‘no, I don’t want to do it’, so it just stopped. Really it’s a story about my own greed rather than anything else.”

The Agatha: Darkhold Diaries debut trailer landed last year, back when it was still called Agatha: Darkhold Diaries.

It’s far from the only gossip Margolyes has to share, however. In her bestselling 2023 memoir Oh Miriam!, Margolyes says she “didn’t like” Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, and brands actor Steve Martin “rather horrid.”

Agatha is Marvel’s upcoming spinoff from 2021 Disney+ series WandaVision. It stars Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness, a centuries-old witch with mastery of magic, and is set to release September 19, 2024.