How come you don't like Hayley Atwell? No hate, I just happened to see a post of yours where you said she was a hippocrate and was wondering your opinion because I don't often see hate about her.
Basically she threw Emily Vancamp under the bus by expressing her displeasure towards staron saying shit like Peggy would “ground her” (Sharon) and just pretty much give Steve a slap on the wrist (much like society is like “boy will be boys” and just let them off- even if their hormonal pursuits put a woman in an uncomfortable position)
And it’s more interesting because after I did some digging (and because I’ve heard so much about it) I found an old tweet where Hayley actually expressed interest and support for Emily and her character which is what I’d likely expect if I still liked her…
But from what I’m told this was a tweet that has since then been deleted and I’m not sure exactly when, but you should also remember Agent Carter (Hayley’s show) cancellation was announced the week of of Civil War’s release (i recall strongly) and to add to that blow her character was also killed off in Civil War in the same movie where Emily’s character was meant to be Steve’s new love interest (as is so in the comics and still to this day) and then the infamous kiss happened and tumblr goes off forever. Hayley was asked at a con what she thought of Steve/Sharon and pretty much it’s what I already said above.
But what you should be taking out of this is how the moment the attention shifted from Hayley she got bitter and basically tossed out any all support for Emily and her character, and I say for a actress who supposedly represents feminist ideals (which I admit is not her fault, that’s the fandom) she sure was quick to show her bitter contempt towards a woman who was already on the receiving end of fandom misogyny.
And of course her fans are- simply put, horrible people (from what i’ve encountered and seen)
She’s also said other problematic things in the past but until I find those I won’t really go off on it. But yeah I don’t really like or care for her now- I hear about her a lot but I don’t see her because her work remains inconsistent anyway.
I’m going to add to this, because her treatment of Emily/Sharon is actually… so much worse.
First, in the long-ago of when The First Avenger came out, before Sharon Carter was cast, HA actually seemed to like Sharon. When she was asked who should play Sharon, or if she would be interested in playing Sharon herself, she said that yes, she would. (Edit: She actually said she thinks it’s “essential.” source, June 29, 2011) She could wear a blonde wig, and it would be true love.
But then, Emily Vancamp was cast, and HA started talking about how Sharon was disrespectful. In the roughly five years since (slightly more? I forget when exactly EVC was cast (edit: It was announced February 1, 2013), HA has said that Steve is “Peggy’s,” that Peggy took Steve’s virginity (source, August 3, 2015), that Sharon is disrespectful, that Steve and Sharon is borderline incestuous that Peggy would lock Sharon in her room and give Steve a stern talking to, that Peggy would be rolling in her grave at the thought of them together, that Peggy would claw her way out of her grave, take the blue serum, and become a supervillain to stop Sharon and Steve from getting together, etc (source, June 4, 2016). She was asked at Dallas Comic Con (I think it was Dallas) if Sharon should have an expanded role in the universe now that Peggy is dead, and she said, “No! Absolutely not! … I’m just joking… I’m not joking.” (haven’t found the exact source for this one yet, but check out this similar one that’s in the same vein from Fan Expo Dallas, timestamp 28:30 source, June 3, 2016. There’s also this one. She’s also taken pictures with fans showing disgust at pictures of Steve and Sharon (here’s one!)- all jokingly, of course. But it’s gone on so long, and her quotes have been so consistent, even when she’s “joking,” that I don’t think it’s a joke anymore.
The tweets above are from when HA and EVC actually met for a benefit in LA. They did some dubsmash videos together, had that twitter conversation, and that was the end of HA being nice or supportive about EVC or Sharon. Within a week, she was again following the talking points in the last paragraph.
Obviously, Hayley has the right to her opinions, and she has the right to ship Steve and Peggy. Plenty of people do. The problem is that what she says, even when she says it in a joking tone, is echoed by some of her fans, taken as fact. Yes, Peggy would hate her great-niece for kissing Steve. Never mind that 1) Peggy and Steve knew each other for less than two and a half years (souce: CA: TFA), 2) had crushes on each other for even less time than that (source: CA: TFA), 3) didn’t spend the entire two and a half years together (source: CA: TFA), 4) only ever shared one kiss, and Steve didn’t ask her out until he thought he was going to die (source: CA: TFA), 5) Peggy would, realistically, care more about her husband of decades and their children and grandchildren (source: CA: WS), 6) Peggy told Steve she wanted him to have a chance at happiness like she’d had (source: CA: WS), 7) Markus, McFeely, and Chris Evans have all confirmed that Peggy and Steve never got together, never had sex, never dated- only had that one kiss (source for Chris, April 28, 2015, with another article from 2016, source for Markus and McFeely, May 7, 2016), and 8) Steve kissed Sharon; she only kissed him back (source: CA: CW).
But Hayley’s comments have real-world consequences. I’m kicking myself for not screencapping it now, but there was a twitter conversation after TWS came out where some of her fans were talking about trying to get EVC to kill herself. Their reasoning was that if EVC killed herself, Sharon would be written out of the MCU, Staron wouldn’t happen, and HA would be happy. There are Sharon fans who have been told to kill themselves because they like Sharon. There’s a hate blog that targets Sharon and her fans (source - also, please note the tags they use, and how they started as a Sharon hate blog but now include EVC) - even boasting about stalking them to keep tabs on them (for an idea how ridiculous it is, here’s a confession submitted to a confessions blog that uses some of my posts, almost verbatim, about why I hate Sharon being turned into Power Broker before twisting it. This is in 2021, and this blog has been doing stuff like this since 2016) - and adores HA. There are articles written that portray HA’s comments as funny and witty, even though the comments are in actuality spiteful and hurtful. There’s been at least one Sharon cosplayer where a Peggy cosplayer made them cry right before having their picture taken with HA (other Peggy cosplayers helped the Sharon cosplayer after) (source), and another Sharon cosplayer who went to a convention and said they felt that a Peggy cosplayer was trying to intimidate them into leaving the convention. And other than the tweets above and another the same night, where she said to give EVC a chance, HA has never shown any support for Sharon or EVC. One drunken night doesn’t overshadow five years of the other things she’s said and done.
HA is extremely talented. I used to be a fan of hers. But she also said in an interview last year that she doesn’t follow people on instagram that she’s jealous of. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she doesn’t follow EVC. And jealousy is a natural, human reaction. But I think it’s safe to say that HA’s thoughts on Sharon/Steve are shaped by her jealousy; she wanted Peggy/Steve to work, or at least a character she played to get with Steve, and it didn’t work out. So she never says, “I don’t support it,” she masks it with “Peggy wouldn’t support it,” and thus is becomes pseudo-canon to Peggy Carter fans and people who read articles that regurgitate her quotes. So she knows she’s jealous, she knows it’s having a real-world impact, and she continues to call herself a feminist while throwing another female character under the bus for the crime of a past flame falling for her. She talks about how important it is for women to support each other, but if that woman gets something she wants, things… change.
I say “women” in a more general sense because Agents of SHIELD fans have noticed a lack of support and other problems with her, too. I’m not as heavily invested in AoS fandom, but I remember there was some sort of drama with the lipsync battles, how HA describes the show as masculine and belittles its lead, Chloe Bennet, and some other stuff. (edit: You can read more about that here, and HA herself talked about how competitive she got at the Fax Expo Dallas Panel in 2016. Around the 16 minute mark, she talks about flying out to film a video with CE and flying back the same day to beat Clark. And again at 11:15.) EDIT: Someone recommended I watch this TikTok, about how Hayley liked tweets about how they didn’t like Chloe.
I know from the length of the post that it seems like I hate HA or something - I’ve certainly been accused of that in the past - but I really don’t. I used to be a fan of hers, even drew her when I was trying to get into sketching again. You can go through my blog and see for yourself, if you like. The problem is that at some point, HA’s behavior toward another woman who did nothing to deserve it, and the behavior her words and actions inspired toward that woman and the woman’s fans, changed. I get that HA doesn’t like how things turned out, but the way she responded says something about her. I used to admire her, but having seen how she’s undermined Peggy’s legacy of supporting women, having seen how she treats another woman for loving and being loved by her fictional crush, I can no longer admire her.
I just wish that she were as good a person as I first thought she was.
Update: I’m editing the post to add sources, dates where I can find them, etc.
More:
The scene where Peggy touches Steve’s bare chest was improvised. (Source, June 29, 2011) Not only is this completely out of line for the time, but she said later she just couldn’t help herself. (“I literally couldn’t help myself, because I hadn’t seen him with his top off until that moment. I mean, go for the man boob! And [the director] loved it. He was like, ‘Do that again!’ So we ended up doing lots of takes just to see how far we could go, and then got a little bit over the top. There was the touching of the nipple, and it became like a Saturday Night Live sketch. It was kind of ridiculous. Really corny.“ (source, July 22, 2011)
There are multiple other occasions at conventions where she grabs Chris’s chest or grabs other male coworkers. (source for one such time)
At Dallas Fan Expo, she was asked what she thinks about Chris Evans. After joking that he’s awful and ugly, she tells the 10-year-old asking that she’s only joking and gets serious about praising him. The moderation makes an “on and on” gesture, to which she says, as if to Chris, “Do you want to go out with me?” then “Yeah, he would… he would definitely go out with me.” You can view the footage for yourself to ascertain how serious she’s being (the last bit didn’t strike me as a joke) at minute 26 of the source.
At Florida Supercon where she says Peggy Carter and her influence could have put Grant Ward on the right path (source, July 17, 2015), unlike, you know, Chloe Bennet’s character. (related note, on the issue of HydraCap in the comics, HA also said that Peggy would have to come back and save him if he wasn’t bluffing. (minute mark 24, Fan Expo Dallas 2016)
Hayley’s twitter was deleted in November 2015. (source) I haven’t found any screencaps of her talking about giving Emily a chance yet, but hopefully someone kept them. Some tweets from her about the dubsmash can be found here. Someone did find her “Absolutely not!” to romanogers, though! Though she does support Stucky. I find it curious that she’s unsupportive of any other woman who isn’t played by her getting near Steve, though, and I rather suspect she knew she had nothing to lose by pandering to the stucky fans - she knew the ship would never happen. It was more about keeping other women away from Steve than it was about supporting the ship.
Wizard Philly, June 5, 2016: She’s asked, now that Peggy is dead, if she could play anyone else in Marvel, who would it be? She answers she’d play Sharon. (source, at 28:15) This is after she’s earlier asked if Peggy had NOT died, how would she feel about the Steve/Sharon kiss, to which she responds, “She would march Sharon back home and ground her.” (source, at 12:28) (Also, at Fan Expo Dallas, just two days earlier, she said, in response to which Avenger superhero she would like to be, “It’s very hard when you play a character like Peggy to then go “Oh, I’d rather be someone else.” I’d like to see HER in the Avengers. I mean, I know she’s dead and all, but no, it’s the Marvel Universe, anything can happen.” (source, at 13:30))
Variety interview, January 19, 2016: Question: Wilkes’ introduction also allows the show to delve into the systemic racism of the time period. Did that feel like a natural progression for you and the producers, given that season one dealt with the sexism of the era? Answer: […] and I think it helps to answer the fans’ ongoing bickering about [wanting] more diversity and “turn Peggy into a lesbian.” We can’t do everything. We have to feel like we’re telling the story that feels we can really go somewhere with something, so this is what we’ve really held on to this season.
Tweets from 2019, basically saying that while Hayley was nice when the writer first met her, the second she was “straight-up rude” and gave the Emma Frost cosplayer paying for a photo with her a dirty look - they think because Hayley thought the cosplayer was actually cosplaying as Sharon.
Another con, undated as of yet: An attendee asked Hayley how she would integrate a Sharon & Peggy interaction into the MCU, and here’s her reply. She didn’t or wouldn’t say Emily’s name, again undermining the idea that she and Emily might be friends, and described Peggy as being “grandmotherly” toward Sharon, which… Peggy was Sharon’s great-aunt. Not a direct ancestor. This isn’t the first time Hayley has mentioned Peggy being Sharon’s “grandmother or something,” though she also obviously knows Peggy is Sharon’s great-aunt, but it fuels the fire of the “incest” argument, and I can’t promise it isn’t intentional.
Also, there’s at least one report that she turned the Conviction set into an “actual hell and the most unpleasant set” the crewperson ever worked on. (source)
I’ve seen some people say that because Emily VanCamp said nice things about Hayley, and because the two of them did a drunken dubsmash together and shared a couple tweets, that it means they’re actually friends. I challenge you to find Emily VanCamp saying ANYTHING negative about other coworkers or their characters (she even found ways to talk positively about the MCU stans who were being absolute assholes toward her). (And she’s very, very aware of people’s thoughts on her and Sharon - when asked what it was like kissing a superhero everyone knows, she joked that she’d just been thinking about lunch before backtracking and saying she’s going to get “so much hell” for that. She doesn’t even feel comfortable joking about her character because she knows people will give her crap about what she says.) I certainly haven’t even heard of her doing so. So please stop saying that because Emily is nice, it means that Hayley is.
(If you’re interested in how poorly Emily VanCamp/Sharon have been treated by others at Marvel, I compiled a somewhat chronological account here.)
More sources to come, but I need to take a break. (EDIT: In the wake of Falcon and Winter Soldier, I’ve realized how little any of the poor treatment matters. Tbh, given how Marvel Studios themselves have treated Sharon/Emily outside of press for projects, it’s hard to argue that they like her at all. If you ever feel the inclination to let Marvel Studios know that Sharon Carter and Emily VanCamp have your support, please consider writing to them at Marvel Studios, LLC / 500 South Buena Vista St / Burbank, CA 91521. I don’t know if it’ll be enough, but it sucks to see her treated so terribly and not try to do something about it.)
