Key Points
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James Spader returns to play Ultron in VisionQuest more than 10 years after Avengers: Age of Ultron.
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The actor explains the winning pitch that brought him back.
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VisionQuest showrunner Terry Matalas shares the “lightning bolt” idea for Spader’s return.
Looking back on the ending of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), star James Spader sees a loophole in which he could’ve possibly returned as the title villain: an A.I. trying to engineer a Biblical world-destroying event.
Vision (Paul Bettany), an android Ultron created from Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) own A.I. helper, J.A.R.V.I.S., fires a beam directly at his father figure. The blast seemingly disintegrates the last mechanical body Ultron inhabits and, with it, the adversary’s final remains. “You see how the end is cut,” Spader points out to Entertainment Weekly. “[It] cut away before you see anything. You realize at that point [Marvel] always leaves a window open, an escape route. With a character like Ultron, he could be anywhere. There could be a cell phone, and he could get in there.”
Marvel seemed content to let Ultron remain dead for the past decade, even if the character featured in other parts of the multiverse through the animated What If…?series. Still, for Spader, “I just didn’t have the time nor the space to even dwell on that for a second,” he says.
Three days after wrapping Avengers: Age of Ultron, the actor, now 66, flew to London to shoot more of The Blacklist, the NBC series he headlined for 10 seasons. “There wasn’t time, there wasn’t energy, there wasn’t inclination to be thinking about anything other than that show,” Spader recalls. “It was seven days a week, that show.”
It was a call from Terry Matalas, the showrunner behind VisionQuest (premiering tonight on Disney+), that marked the first time Marvel approached him about an Ultron return. The creative, who delivered an adored final season of Star Trek: Picard (starring a different MCU star, Patrick Stewart), came aboard to spearhead the concluding TV series in what is now branded as theWandaVisiontrilogy, this one focused on Bettany as Vision.
“Like a lightning bolt, the first thing that went into my mind was James Spader,” Matalas tells EW separately. “I absolutely adore that last scene in Age of Ultron between the two of them and could have watched hours more of them chewing it up. I was like, ‘Well, what if that is the show?'”
That led to a series of questions, which resulted in the decision to make Ultron alive all this time. He was just locked away in his software state somewhere deep inside Vision’s mind. So when White Vision, S.W.O.R.D.’s weaponized copy of the original from WandaVision (2021), goes off on a quest to solve an identity crisis, he has his toxic father serving as his personal Hannibal Lecter — someone to converse with while trapped in the confines of Vision’s mind.
Matalas envisioned what became this “Mindspace” as a giant mansion filled with personified renderings of various A.I. programs, including D.U.M.-E (Henry Lewis), U (Jonathan Sayer), J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), and E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire). But it all stemmed from the Ultron concept.
“It did come out of the blue when Terry reached out about revisiting it,” Spader remarks, “but revisiting it in such an entirely different way.”
Getting Spader was easier than Matalas thought. He flew to New York City for a lunch with the Hollywood great from Pretty in Pink and Crash, a meeting that ran upwards of 3-and-a-half hours. “I pitched him this Gonzo idea, and he said yes right at the lunch,” Matalas recalls. “He was like, ‘I wanna do this. This is so weird. This is so unexpected.’ We hit it off right away.”
Spader is an economical kind of actor. He often acknowledges that the business of acting has changed dramatically over the past decade since he played Ultron, and movie-making is no longer as sustainably lucrative as it once was. TV is where he prefers to remain.
“Even more enticing for the [Ultron] revisit [was] the idea of it being the show,” Spader comments, “because the format was so different, where you could really concentrate on these characters and really let them grow into themselves.”
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The passage of time became crucial to Spader’s understanding of the Ultron we meet now. “Really every decision and choice that was made for the show, whether it was about me or anyone else, was informed by that passage of time,” he explains. “And for Ultron, all the more. He’d been in prison for over a decade, and that really forced him to stop for a moment.”
The villain from Age of Ultron was “ravenous,” he describes. “He was like a bratty teenager eating, filling himself with junk food and consuming as much knowledge and information as he possibly could.” The Ultron of VisionQuest, Spader adds, is someone who was “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.”
The first two episodes of VisionQuest will be available to stream on Disney+ starting tonight, Tuesday, Oct. 13, at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
