Paul Bettany will return as Vision in VisionQuest and the actor has teased that the upcoming Disney+ series could just be the beginning of where the character might go.
Paul Bettany on VisionQuest
It was assumed that Jac Schaeffer, who created WandaVision and Agatha All Along, would serve the same role on VisionQuest, but she decided to step away from the project, which shocked Bettany. However, Star Trek: Picard‘s Terry Matalas was quickly brought in to take over the series.
“I felt like the rug had been pulled from under my feet,” Bettany told Entertainment Weekly. “I love her very much and we made a lovely thing together. I had been waiting and looking forward to having my turn with Jac. And then 24 hours later, I was at a lunch with Terry, because that’s the speed at which Marvel move.“
It was Matalas who brought up the idea of bringing James Spader back as Ultron. “The moment he went to me, ‘What do you think about getting James Spader back?’ I was like, “F—! That’s a great idea,’” Bettany recalled. “Then the question was, Would he do it? But I was pretty confident that he would because it’s so eccentric and Terry’s so eccentric in the way that he thinks. Once we had James on board, we had a grandfather, a father, and a son.“
Much of VisionQuest is still being kept under wraps, but Bettany teased that the show is “a springboard for where Vision might go” and that “it feels like the beginning of something for a new type of Vision.“
Why Does Ultron Look Human?
If you’ve watched the teaser trailer for VisionQuest, you’ll know that James Spader spends much of the trailer looking like… well, James Spader. Ultron’s robot form does appear, but Matalas explained to Polygon why we’ll be seeing more of the human form of Ultron, and it’s not because of the budget.
“It’s funny, people say it’s a budget thing, it’s not, it’s a James Spader thing. I love James Spader. Who doesn’t love James Spader? I just want to see James and I want to see Bettany,” he said. “You’ll get plenty of robot action in the show. The show is very much inspired by that last scene in Age of Ultron between the two of them. But watching Spader and Bettany chew up the scenery was something I saw in my head from the very beginning.“
He continued, “It is prohibitively expensive to do a CGI robot 24/7, but I also don’t want to see a CGI robot. It’s not going to be able to emote and do the things that James Spader can do with just the twitch of an eyebrow. So that’s pretty much the main reason.“
VisionQuest will debut on Disney+ on October 14.
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