In late September, news broke that Epic Games was pulling a Fortnite character emote drawn from the dance intro sequence of James Gunn’s Peacemaker season 2 over concerns that the choreography might be meant to evoke a swastika. That concern emerged after a point in the show where John Cena’s character learned that in the alternate dimension he was exploring, the Nazis triumphed in World War II, leading to a civilization built around white supremacy. The emote was eventually re-released in a modified form.
Steve Agee, who plays doleful tech wizard John Economos in Peacemaker, tells Polygon that DC Studios co-CEO Gunn, writer-director of Peacemaker, Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and the 2025 Superman, was baffled by the concern over the dance.
“I talked to James about this just about a week and a half ago,” Agee said. “We were texting, and he was like, ‘I am so perplexed by this.’ Charissa Barton, our choreographer, never had the scripts. She did not know that Nazis were involved in this season when she created the dance number. So any resemblance to a swastika with this dance is purely coincidental.”
Agee compared the season 2 intro, set to Foxy Shazam’s “Oh Lord,” with the first season’s similarly stylized intro dance sequence, which became a social media phenomenon and revived the career of Norwegian band WigWam.
“If you look at our dance moves in season 1 as well, they’re kind of bizarre,” Agee said. “It’s not like typical Broadway dance moves — it’s just weird body positions and movements. [Season 2’s intro sequence] was just more of that. But Charissa didn’t have access to the scripts — she first saw the episodes as they aired. I’m pretty sure that was Charissa’s first time finding out what was happening on the show.”
Agee says the second season intro dance was a far more elaborate project than the original version.
“We shot it over two days, whereas the first dance number, we shot in one day,” he said. “We shot the first season in this small school gymnasium, but [for season 2, we were] on a major sound stage at Trilith Studios, with massive lighting setups and an LED panel in back of us. It was a much bigger deal. But when you break it down, it still felt similar to the first season’s dance number in terms of learning it and shooting it.”
Barton’s process involved teaching each group of cast members their small section of the dance — “it’s literally a four-second section of us dancing, and then it would cut to somebody else” — and giving them each individual footage of themselves from the rehearsal.
“So we would learn that section, and she would videotape you on your phone and send you home with the video to hopefully rehearse,” Agee said, laughing. “Although I think a lot of us probably didn’t rehearse a lot.”
Still, he found the season 2 dance number slightly more natural than the season 1 intro. “They’re both weird songs to dance to,” he said. “‘Oh Lord’ by Foxy is probably easier because it’s more poppy — WigWam’s a little more rock. But yeah, I’m not a dancer, so I found them both difficult, and it wasn’t because of the song. It’s just because it’s hard for me to dance.”
Both seasons of Peacemaker are now streaming on HBO Max.
