In addition to yesterday’s reveal of Ultron (and his robotic clones), the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly also offered up quite a few details about Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and Vision (Paul Bettany), three more classic members of the Avengers team who will be introduced in the film. Of course, it’s worth noting early on that some of what’s discussed about the characters could be considered spoiler territory, so if you’re inclined to avoid that sort of thing, consider this your warning.
Much like their comics counterparts, it seems as if siblings Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver won’t start off as heroic figures, following a path from foe to friend of the world’s superheroes.
“They’re on Team Ultron, which makes things really hard for the Avengers because all of sudden they’re dealing with powers that they’re not used to,” revealed Age Of Ultron director Joss Whedon, alluding to the mix of mental and magic powers wielded by Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s super-speed in the film.
“With The Avengers, everybody pretty much had the power of being able to punch somebody,” he explained. “And now we have a woman who can get inside your head and move objects, and a boy that can move faster than anything, and a robot [Ultron] who can self-replicate and is out of his mind. So all of sudden, it’s a darker, weirder, tougher world that they’re living in.”
Taylor-Johnson indicated that the Romani origins of the pair will carry over from the Marvel Comics world, too — though the film is careful to avoid any connection between the version of Quicksilver in Age Of Ultron and the version recently played by Evan Peters in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.
“He’s quick tempered. He gets agitated. He’s impatient. But he’s super protective,” said Taylor-Johnson of his character, who has a close — sometimes uncomfortably close — relationship with his sister. (In a bit of Hollywood coincidence, the pair played characters with a romantic relationship in the recent Godzilla reboot.) “They’re very yin-and-yang in that twin sense. In his power, he’s physical and she’s psychological. My character is very much on the frontline, but he can be quite emotional. You see this beautiful tenderness between them.”
“In the comics, every time you see an image of them, they’re always holding each other’s hand and looking over each other’s shoulder,” said Olsen of their characters’ relationship. “They’re always so close, it’s almost uncomfortable. Aaron and I have been playing a little bit with those kinds of images just for ourselves.”
As for her character, Olsen said the Scarlet Witch’s lack of any formal education about her powers and what she’s capable of doing with them has made her a bit aloof from everyone but her brother.
“The reason she’s so special is because she has such a vast amount of knowledge that she’s unable to learn how to control it,” said Olsen. “No one taught her how to control it properly. So it gets the best of her. It’s not that she’s mentally insane, it’s just that she’s just overly stimulated. And she can connect to this world and parallel worlds at the same time, and parallel times.”
Finally, Age Of Ultron also features the on-screen debut of Paul Bettany, who previously voiced Tony Stark’s artificially intelligent computer assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. and will now play the humanoid robot Vision in front of the cameras. Bettany indicated that the casting of him in this new role wasn’t a coincidence, offering some support to speculation that J.A.R.V.I.S. will be linked to Vision in some way.
“It’s like if you think about the five different ways that [The Vision] could come together, this one’s definitely the most interesting of the five,” added returning cast member Robert Downey, Jr. “I was running other scenarios and I’ve seen it progress over drafts. It was just kind of really good, right from the start.”
While Marvel hasn’t released any images of Bettany as the android character, EW offered up a description of test footage of Bettany as Vision that had the actor donning purple makeup and various tech-friendly accents. The movie’s version of Vision, EW reports, will be “more Borg and a little less Crayola.”
Avengers: Age Of Ultron hits theaters May 1, 2015,
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