Two episodes in, and Marvel’s newest Maximoff has made a big impression. VisionQuest was supposed to be Paul Bettany’s comeback tour, but a lot of the early buzz is about the kid Vision didn’t know he still had. Critics got there first: one called Ruaridh Mollica’s Tommy a true revelation, another said it’s impossible not to be moved by his performance, and reviewers have singled out his chemistry with Bettany as one of the premiere’s biggest strengths. Even MCU skeptics have been won over.
Who is Ruaridh Mollica?
If the name is new to you, it won’t be for long. Mollica is a Scottish actor, writer and director, born in Prato, Italy, in October 1999 and raised in Edinburgh, where he went to Broughton High School. He started young, making his TV debut at 12 in a BBC One series, and later picked up credits including The Spanish Princess.
His big breakthrough came in 2024 with Sebastian, playing lead character Max Williamson. The film premiered at Sundance and earned him a Scottish BAFTA nomination. He has a good origin story too: at an early casting call, he was asked if he could ride a horse and said yes, even though he had recently fallen off one.
The online love started before the show even aired. When Marvel released a still of Tommy, fans flooded the replies saying he looked strikingly like Chris Evans, with one joking that from that angle he could pass for Steve Rogers’ kid. For the record, his actual dad is a synthezoid. Close enough.
There’s also a sweet bit of timing. The first two episodes dropped on Mollica’s 27th birthday, which he told i-D made it the most memorable birthday of his life.
All about Tommy and how he is even alive
Fair question. When we last saw Wanda and Vision’s twins in WandaVision, they blinked out of existence along with the rest of the Westview Hex. Wanda then spent Multiverse of Madness tearing through realities to find versions of the boys she’d lost. So VisionQuest dropping a living, breathing, adult Tommy into the real world is quite a twist, and showrunner Terry Matalas has said viewers in a hurry could skip Agatha All Along. You can skip it. You just won’t understand much of what happens with Tommy.
Here’s the short version. Agatha All Along revealed that Wanda’s magic boys had real souls that kept going after the Hex fell. Billy’s soul landed in the body of William Kaplan, a Westview resident who died in a car crash during WandaVision’s finale. Once Billy figured out who he was, he went looking for his brother.
Creator Jac Schaeffer confirmed that Billy succeeded in putting Tommy’s soul into the body of a young man who’d been the victim of a teen prank, and he chose a boy who was drowning after being bullied and had no loving family to take care of him. Fun fact: when Agatha All Along was made, the role of Tommy hadn’t even been cast.
So who is Tommy Maximoff, exactly?
Technically, he’s two people. His body belongs to a young man named Thomas Shepherd, but his soul is Tommy Maximoff’s, and Mollica says the balance between the two shaped his whole performance, as noted by Comic Book, quoting Screen Rant.
In VisionQuest, he’s an 18-year-old orphan who has just aged out of London’s foster care system. In other words, he’s not exactly living the superhero dream.
He’s living the con artist dream instead. Mollica describes Tommy as a grifter, a small-time thief, and a bit of an artful dodger who’s lost and looking for purpose.
The premiere shows him running cons in a pub with his partner Lisa Molinari (Lauren Morais); she likes quiet pickpocketing, while Tommy loves the theatre of a long grift. Classic dad-was-a-supercomputer-mum-rewrote-reality energy.
His double life is also what gets him into trouble. The bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick) grabs Tommy and sends Vision old footage of the boy telling police about memories of Wanda and Vision that shouldn’t exist. Bait set, trap sprung, and the father-son road trip is under way. Mollica says that when Tommy first sees Vision’s face, he doesn’t recognize him and assumes it’s a delusion. Relatable, honestly.
The comic book cheat sheet
If the name Thomas Shepherd sounds familiar, you’ve probably read Young Avengers. In the comics, Billy and Tommy grow up to become the heroes Wiccan and Speed. The family history is gloriously messy: West Coast Avengers eventually revealed the twins were magical constructs that Wanda subconsciously created from lost fragments of the demon lord Mephisto’s soul.
The MCU skipped the demon part (for now). The superspeed is clearly coming, though. His blue-lightning speed in the trailers all but confirms he’s the twin Wanda lost. Basically, Uncle Pietro’s genes skipped a generation and landed somewhere useful.
What comes next is the big question. Tommy is on the road with a dad he barely knows, an assassin on their tail, and a brother out there somewhere. Judging by the reaction to his first two episodes, fans are more than happy to tag along.