VisionQuest features the grand return of James Spader as Utron. He last played the character over a decade ago in Avengers: Age of Ultron. So what finally brought him back?
James Spader on Returning as Ultron
Just days after completing work on Age of Ultron, Spader was hard at work shooting The Blacklist, so there was never really time to dwell on whether he might return as the character. “I just didn’t have the time nor the space to even dwell on that for a second,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “There wasn’t time, there wasn’t energy, there wasn’t inclination to be thinking about anything other than that show. It was seven days a week, that show.“
Surprisingly, Marvel never approached him about returning as Ultron until Terry Matalas called about VisionQuest.
“It did come out of the blue when Terry reached out about revisiting it,” Spader said, “but revisiting it in such an entirely different way.” The idea of returning to a TV show, rather than a movie, was very appealing to the actor. “You could really concentrate on these characters and really let them grow into themselves,” he said.
As for how Ultron has changed over the last decade, Spader describes the villain from Age of Ultron as “a bratty teenager eating, filling himself with junk food and consuming as much knowledge and information as he possibly could.” But the Ultron of VisionQuest has been “forced to stop and pay attention and dwell, literally and figuratively. And that tells you all you need to know about where the character’s at. How that manifests is what the show is.“
What We Thought of VisionQuest
Our own Alex Maidy enjoyed his time with VisionQuest, although he admitted it wasn’t as “unique or distinct” as WandaVision, but that it worked better than Agatha All Along.
“VisionQuest is a fun and emotional journey for one of the MCU’s underutilized characters and it closes this trilogy better than I could have hoped,” he wrote. “Paul Bettany is excellent in his broadest portrayal of Vision, and James Spader is hilariously brilliant in a performance that improves upon his first turn as Ultron. I hope we get to see both actors return in future MCU projects.” You can check out the rest of his review right here.
The first two episodes of VisionQuest will debut on Disney+ tonight.
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