It’s been almost five years since we last saw the Vision in WandaVision, but now he’s back – or a version of him is, anyway – in the new Disney+ series VisionQuest. Paul Bettany returns as the android (synthezoid for you Marvel heads) alongside James Spader’s Ultron and a variety of other AIs from the MCU, including JARVIS (James D'Arcy), FRIDAY (Orla Brady), and EDITH (Emily Hampshire).
But you know who’s not present for the new show? Wanda Maximoff or the Avengers. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise considering that Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) is, well, dead after the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the Avengers just aren’t themselves these days, what with there apparently being two teams floating around the MCU right now (which none of the original members are a part of).
Notably, in the VisionQuest premiere, Vision muses to himself about how he seems to have evaded everyone who’s been looking for him since the events of WandaVision. “There isn’t an enemy, an acquaintance… or even an Avenger trying to find the Vision,” he says. But when he says this line, Bettany delivers it with a sort of melancholy realization. So of course I had to ask the actor about it when we spoke recently – specifically if Vision feels abandoned by the Avengers in that moment.
“Well, I think so,” Bettany explains. “I finally realized that I was really making Vision for a version of me as a child, where I felt like the outsider who was bullied. I didn't think I would ever fit in anywhere. So it's just a moment to remind [us]... It's sitting on a chair at a dance, a school dance, you know what I mean? And having the courage to go and talk to a girl.”
And then there’s the Wanda of it all. Somehow I doubt there’s a single Marvel fan out there who thinks the Scarlet Witch is really, truly dead, despite the whole Mount Wundagore falling on top of her thing in Doctor Strange 2. At this point in the series, Vision (formerly known as White Vision, who lacked the emotions and memories of the original Vision before meeting a magical version of the OG back in WandaVision – it was a whole thing) is detached from humanity, as well as any deep feelings about Wanda (or at least that’s how he’s presenting). But how about Ultron, the now-imprisoned villain who Wanda and her late brother Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) once worked for? What are his thoughts on the Vision’s former partner and the mother of their children?
“He's pretty rude about Wanda,” Spader tells me. Essentially, Wanda is dead now, and so for Ultron she doesn’t matter anymore. “Ultron lives in the present. He really lives in the present. And he's ready to step forward. And he's not going to step forward until he shoves [Vision] ahead of him.”
Regarding the relationship between Vision and Ultron, while when we first meet him here, Ultron is trapped in the artificial reality that Vision has constructed, the two clearly have an important bond. “He's sort of like a quasi-therapist, psychotic father figure,” Bettany says of Spader’s character.
“I think without question, he looks at him as a son-like figure,” says Spader. “It serves him well to perceive him as that. ... But I think the more interesting thing is how much it matters to him how Vision perceives him. And it's touching in a way because he … allows himself to not care or to appear to not care, but he does. He really does care. But what's interesting is it's not so much he cares how he feels about Vision. It's he really cares about how Vision perceives him.”
Fans will recall the great scene between Vision and Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron, where the two synthetic lifeforms discussed humanity – both the pros and the cons of the species. It was that scene – which Spader points out was actually filmed in a parking lot and not a forest as it appears to be in the final film – which really is a key to why Ultron is back for VisionQuest, and what the relationship between the two characters is all about.
“It's this little seed of the last scene with them in Age of Ultron,” says Spader. “[We] grew it and watered it and fed it and raised it and gave it light and it blossomed into this amazing show and story. And these characters, they came from this seed, but they grow into this fabulous thing, this fabulous creation [that's] funny and moving and sad and tragic and incredibly exciting and thrilling and disturbing at times.”
In that scene from 11 years ago, Vision says the following to the defeated Ultron:
“Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites, and try to control what won't be. But there is grace in their failings. I think you missed that.”
Says Spader, “He spends 13 years really embracing that idea and really embracing humanity because of that idea. Where it's him. He is chaos. That's what he is. That's what he lives for. That's who he is. And yet his son is dedicated at this present time to trying to find order and trying to process this. And what they then learn from one another is fabulous and funny and exciting and challenging for both of them. And they both get as much from each other as the other.”
The actors also think that there’s been a shift of perspective for Vision since Age of Ultron in that the events since that film – when Viz was, don’t forget, just born yesterday – have caused the android to have “very real doubts” and be confused by the chaos of the world, and more specifically, the chaos that humanity brings.
“But it's funny, the two of them are very different,” continues Spader. “Vision has a sense of consequences and has a sense of collateral effect that I don't think Ultron... Ultron just wants more. And I don't think he thinks about the consequences. I think he accepts chaos in all its forms and therefore … the dichotomy between their two reactions, and how it comes together, they force it together.”
VisionQuest is streaming on Disney+ now.