Who Peggy Carter is
In The First Avenger, Peggy is the officer training recruits for the super-soldier program, and she is the first person to see that skinny Steve Rogers has the right heart for it. She is sharp, brave and far better at her job than the men who doubt her. She also has one of the best entrances of any MCU character: she knocks a rude recruit flat with a single punch.
Her romance with Steve is the emotional anchor of his whole story. It is built on respect first, and it is one of the reasons Captain America's later films hit so hard.
Her appearances in order
- Captain America: The First Avenger (2011, film, essential)
- Marvel's Agent Carter (2015, series, optional)
- Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013, series, optional): a flashback guest appearance
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014, film, essential)
- Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015, film, essential): a brief vision
- Ant-Man (2015, film, recommended): the opening flashback
- Avengers: Endgame (2019, film, essential): short but important
- What If...? (2021, series, optional)
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022, film, essential)
- Avengers: Doomsday (2026, film, essential, upcoming)
We list them in story order, which is why Agent Carter, set right after the war, comes before The Winter Soldier.
How her life unfolds
The First Avenger ends with Peggy and Steve separated, and her last conversation with him is one of the saddest moments in the early MCU. Agent Carter picks up in postwar New York, where she works for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, is treated as a secretary by her colleagues and secretly takes on missions to clear Howard Stark's name. It is a fun, stylish spy show with a real sense of period.
Fast-forward to the present day in The Winter Soldier. Steve visits Peggy, now much older, and their short scene together is quiet and painful. It also reminds you that she built S.H.I.E.L.D., the organization that the film is about to put under a microscope.
Her alternate-universe titles take her somewhere else entirely. What If...? opens with a universe where Peggy, not Steve, takes the serum and becomes Captain Carter. Multiverse of Madness brings a live-action version of that hero from another reality; it is a short role, and best enjoyed as a surprise.
Allies and enemies
Steve Rogers is the center of her story, but her friendship with Howard Stark runs through both The First Avenger and Agent Carter. Arnim Zola is a Hydra scientist she fights in the war, and his later fate inside S.H.I.E.L.D. is a dark irony. Sharon Carter, the agent who keeps an eye on Steve in his apartment building, turns out to be family. Crossbones and Bucky Barnes belong to Steve's side of the story, but each one is tied to the S.H.I.E.L.D. she built and the war she fought.
Hayley Atwell as Peggy
Atwell plays Peggy with warmth, wit and a backbone of steel, and she makes the period setting feel natural rather than costume-y. In Agent Carter she carries a whole series on her own. Her later versions, as Captain Carter, let her play a full-on action hero. Outside Marvel, audiences know her as the thief Grace in the Mission: Impossible films and as Christopher Robin's wife, Evelyn, in Christopher Robin.
The order to watch
Start with The First Avenger, then The Winter Soldier: those two give you Peggy's main story. Agent Carter is optional but very rewarding if you liked her in the first film. What If...? is an animated what-if, so its first episode is enough for her. Watch Multiverse of Madness last, ideally after the What If...? episode, so you recognize who you are seeing.