The narrator of the stories where everything went differently, who swore only to watch and could not keep it up.
Every episode of What If…? opens with the same voice explaining that in this universe, one thing happened differently. The voice belongs to the Watcher, played by Jeffrey Wright, a member of a race whose entire purpose is to observe the multiverse and never step into it. He is the frame the series is built in, and for a while he is only that.
The interesting part is that the frame does not hold. A Doctor Strange who has lost everything hears him and begs for help, and the Watcher refuses. Then an Ultron who has finished with his own universe hears him too, and wants the rest. The rule that was the whole of his character turns out to be the thing he has to give up, and the rest of the series is about what a being like that does once he has done it.
Wright plays him warm rather than grand. The writers compared him to somebody watching a video of a rat carrying a slice of pizza: interested, moved even, and with no intention of joining in. That distance is what makes the moments he crosses it land.
Minor spoiler
By the third season his interference has a record: information handed to Strange Supreme so he could rebuild his universe, people pulled out of their own stories before they died, a Captain Carter drawn into his affairs. The other Watchers, the Eminence, the Incarnate and the Executioner, put him on trial for it, and the season is the trial and the escape. His name, Uatu, is finally used here, in a flashback to when he was recruited.
Show detailsWhere else he turns up, and why some of it is not counted
The Watchers as a race appear first in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, in the Stan Lee cameo, where Lee is their informant; this Watcher is not one of them on screen, so that film is not in his list. He has silent cameos in X-Men ‘97, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and, in the reading Marvel’s animation head has acknowledged, a pattern of broken glass in Daredevil: Born Again. The first is not counted because the series’ own producers said it is not necessarily the same version of him; the other two because the sources name the series and not the season, and this catalogue is filed by season. The two animated series where he is named as Uatu, Eyes of Wakanda and Marvel Zombies, are counted.