Wed, November 4, 2026 at 2:39 PM UTC
Key Points
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Paul Bettany plays two additional roles on VisionQuest.
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The actor explains that he wasn’t originally going to play Dr. Phineas Horton but lays out why that all changed.
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Showrunner Terry Matalas explains why they didn’t want to use the name “Human Torch” for J.I.M.
Warning: This article contains spoilers fromVisionQuestepisode 7, “Immolation.”
Paul Bettany now has another thing in common with his Marvel pals Chris Evans: both actors have now played the Human Torch. More specifically, characters who’ve used the name Human Torch in the past.
The penultimate episode of VisionQuest revealed two additional secret roles that Bettany plays on the Disney+ series: Dr. Phineas Horton, the World War II-era scientist who laid the foundation for artificial intelligence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and J.I.M., the first A.I. of the MCU.
It’s a comic book deep cut. The character of Jim Hammond was a human-like robot that operated as the original Human Torch. Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four, currently portrayed on screen by Joseph Quinn, now bears the name decades later in the timeline. However, Mr. Hammond held the original moniker due to his ability to burst into flame and fly.
In the context of VisionQuest, J.I.M. was Dr. Horton’s breakthrough with artificial intelligence that would eventually lead to the creation of Vision. The invention wasn’t quite up to snuff at the time as J.I.M. would often spontaneously combust. “That should be a show,” showrunner Terry Matalas tells Entertainment Weekly. “When he gets emotional, he overloads. It’s such a great metaphor. I’ve got some crazy ideas about how to tell that story, but, yeah, you would love to see him run around in World War II and be a part of things…. I wanna see that guy go up against the Nazis.”
J.I.M. was an early concept from Matalas, known for shows like 12 Monkeys and Star Trek: Picard. He points to the setup for the character in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). The 1943 setting of that film sees a pre-Super Soldier Steve Rogers (Evans) attend an exposition in New York with pal Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). Phineas’ android, donning a red suit, is on display.
“You knew A.I. existed before Tony Stark in some way,” Matalas says. “Anything that was A.I. or robot was part of the conversation early on.”
Matalas always planned to have Bettany play J.I.M. but not Phineas. “We were in London looking at lists,” the showrunner remembers. “Every time we went down to somebody, there was a stunt-cast thing.” Bettany then considered taking on all three roles himself. The reason? “So that we can really understand the corrupted files being passed down from OS systems and humans into robots, and then robots finally into humans in a visual way,” the star says.
Marvel approved the idea, but then came the reality of performing three characters in the same scene. Vision finds J.I.M. and Phineas in his mindscape as they all grapple with father-son dynamics. In the case of Phineas, he threw himself into creating J.I.M. after losing his own child.
“It was a really mind-bending three days,” Bettany describes.
The star worked closely with his stunt double, John Macdonald. Each day, Bettany would film coverage of a different character, while Macdonald read the lines of the other parts in the scene. The next day, they’d swap. “It was a real jigsaw puzzle,” Bettany continues. “It was more that you have everybody’s lines in your head in a really uncomfortable way. So it’s hard to be surprised when you know exactly the questions that are gonna be asked of you.”
When it came to the look of J.I.M., Matalas and his team looked at everything in the comics, as well as the suit from Captain America — “which we actually had in the background [of VisionQuest] hanging up,” the executive producer and writer recalls. “But it was mostly a painted diving suit, so we didn’t put the camera too close to it.”
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Breaking the storyline of Phineas Horton further informed the clockwork design. “If you look, there’s clockwork everywhere in thes out. “That felt really fresh and fun and era appropriate for what that A.I. could be.”
The Human Torch connection between Bettany’s J.I.M. and Evans’ past as Johnny Storm in the Fox era of Fantastic Four movies is the stuff of Marvel lore, but Matalas confirms they didn’t want to reference that superhero name at all on VisionQuest. “At the time we were making this, Fantastic Four [the 2025 film] hadn’t even come out yet,” he notes. “So we didn’t wanna confuse the audience, but we always make those jokes. It’s really fun to do.”
The VisionQuest finale will now premiere on Disney+ on Nov. 10.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
