Coded Easter Eggs and AI Personalities on the Set of VisionQuest

Fashion is an oddly important aspect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of Vision (Paul Bettany). His comic book counterpart spent decades in roughly the same color scheme, silhouette, and superhero vibe. Over in the MCU, the character has gone from that starting point to a more human look — recall the brilliance of business-casual Vision from Captain America: Civil War — back to his superhero style and even an all-white variation of that look in the final episodes of WandaVision.

Oh, wait, that last one is not quite the same Vision.

Nevertheless, October’s VisionQuest takes viewers back to that strange, second Vision. Years after getting a download of the original Vision’s memories, he must now contend with what that means and whether or not he is, in fact, the true Vision. And part of that is also embracing the character’s fashion sense.

When Rotten Tomatoes and several other outlets were invited to the set of VisionQuest in 2025, Vision’s peculiar fascination with style was foremost on our minds, so we asked Bettany directly about this aspect of the character(s). After a laugh, he joked, “I’m a very shallow human being and I really like clothes. I know they are only clothes, but I really like clothes. And so yeah, I get very involved in his clothing choices.”

It should also be noted he was wearing an exquisite three-piece pinstripe suit at that moment. “This is all code,” he said, pointing to some of the details on the sleeves of the suit jacket and the pant legs. “People are going to have a really good time freeze-framing and trying to read it.”

Costume designer Sarah Young went into more detail about the suit when we had a chance to talk to her about the Vision’s style. “I wanted everything to feel kind of normal,” she explained. “Vision in his pinstripe suit – you think it’s a pinstripe suit and then actually it isn’t when you look closer. You realize something was a bit off and something wasn’t quite so straightforward about it.”

That led to unusual cuts and that special code in the pinstripe. “[Showrunner Terry Matalas] and the writers were involved in writing because we had someone actually write all the code and then it took us forever to work out a way of printing it so that it fades in and out,” she added.

“It would be funny if it turned out to be something that gets me canceled,” Bettany joked. “Yeah, Terry would write that.”

Another element of the new wardrobe: incorporating Vision’s original look and outline into his human form. So, keep an eye out for representations of the Mind Stone and Vision’s traditional patterns on his ties.

Of course, not everything in the upcoming series boils down to Bettany’s ability to be impeccably dressed while playing a robot. While we were on set, the title VisionQuest was still in flux — even if it was already on crew jackets — but Marvel Studios and Disney eventually locked down the name and went one step further: announcing the project as the third part of a trilogy of programs alongside WandaVision and Agatha All Along.

True to this mission statement, the series centers on this amalgamated version of Vision as he wrestles with identity and hopes to reconnect with the family he seemingly lost after the Westview incident dramatized in WandaVision. It is a journey that will take Vis across the world and take viewers deep into his mind.

“He has his memories, but he doesn’t have any of his feelings and he can’t connect with those memories in an emotional way,” Bettany said.

“I love Vision,” he continued. “I loved all the different versions of him as he starts off as a sort of ingenue, but he’s also omnipotent and that’s a really fun idea with the ‘I was born yesterday’ stuff when he’s accused of being naïve.”

“This Vision is a fresh start for him,” Matalas explained. “But he also has the knowledge and experience of the old versions of him… It’s almost like being in a coma for years and years and coming out and being like, ‘I kind of remember this, but I’m not quite attached to it.’”

According to the showrunner, “He was already on an identity quest right from that last moment we saw him in WandaVision. So it just felt natural to think of him as a way to look at humanity in a way that his old self didn’t. When we first met Vision in those movies, he was fully-formed. He understood humanity in a really profound way.”

Now, “it felt like maybe [this Vision] doesn’t quite get us,” Matalas said. “And I think that’s a bit more relatable because I don’t really get us.”

Although “living a quite discreet life” as a normal human bartender, Vis spends a lot of time inside a mental construct of an ideal home Bettany called the “mind space.” There, he confronts the nature of his existence by talking to the other artificial intelligences created by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) both before and after Vision came to be in Avengers: Age of Ultron. “It’s funny and it’s emotional and great,” he said.

“He needed individuals to speak to that might have different perspectives on humanity,” Matalas added. “It led to this version of what’s going on in his head and who else could be up there.”

One such AI is D.U.M.-E, one of the robot arms featured in the Iron Man movies. Although, inside Vision’s mind space mansion, he takes on the form of a workman played by Henry Lewis. The actor spoke to the difficulty in giving voice to a robot that previously only gesticulated. “I spent hours in my house just pretending to be an arm,” he joked. Of course, the character is part of a double-bill with Jonathan Sayer as U, the other Iron Man arm.

“They’re probably comedically sometimes not quite as in sync as they think they are,” Lewis explained. “So definitely the way that U is quite often a beat behind. He thinks he’s got the answer and then D.U.M.-E ‘s like, ‘No, that’s not the answer, is it?’”

Emily Hampshire’s E.D.I.T.H., meanwhile, is inside the mind space to help Vision understand the concept of fun. A strange mission for an AI originally designed to give Peter Parker (Tom Holland) access to all of Tony’s resources and arsenal via a pair of sunglasses. On the day we visited the set, E.D.I.T.H. could be seen holding her hands at her hips in a very superhero-like manner.

“When you’re fun, people don’t really take you that seriously. It’s not important. So, I’m trying to be important, I think,” she said. Although the character was voiced by Dawn Michelle King in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Hampshire felt excited to be “coming out of glasses because now I’m a whole person.”

According to Hampshire, the AIs of the mind space take human form because “[Vision] has insisted on human avatars for all the AIs… It is an experiment in learning about what it is like to be human, but in a way that might be generated by an AI.”

Other AIs featured in the mansion include Orla Brady as F.R.I.D.A.Y, James D’Arcy as J.A.R.V.I.S., and James Spader as Ultron. All have appeared in previous Marvel projects before, but never quite like this — which is to say in human form with Brady, Hampshire, and D’Arcy taking over from other actors who previously voiced the characters.

The change with the most lore is, of course, D’Arcy as an older version of J.A.R.V.I.S. Bettany voiced that character before becoming Vision while D’Arcy played Howard Stark’s (Dominic Cooper) butler Edwin Jarvis in Agent Carter and made a brief appearance in Avengers: Endgame. The character is meant to be Tony’s inspiration for J.A.R.V.I.S., so giving that AI D’Arcy’s face has a symmetry to it. “[He’s] almost like a brother to him,” Matalas explained.

And Spader’s Ultron? “If this is a father-son story, who is his father? That led to Ultron being the almost cursed, really loud, terrible, messed-up father that you have to deal with,” Matalas said. In fact, he’s so messed up, Vis keeps him in a “New York loft-like prison” room within the mind space even though he is a back-up of the original Ultron. “It’s a bucket list to have Bettany and Spader in the same scene together. It’s pretty incredible,” the producer added.

All of these characters inhabit the mind space mansion, a true wonder of a set. It’s inviting, but unsettling. An ideal home until you look closely at the details. As Matalas explained, “It has an amalgamation of a simulation of a living environment. If you look at the banister by the stairs, it doesn’t quite go up all the way and there are pieces missing in the way that when AI can spit back an image using all its information to consolidate into one, it gets things slightly off.”

For all the talk of AI and what they might do to generate a house or a really good suit, Matalas says no generative AI was used in realizing the series. “There hasn’t really been a need,” he said.

But in the fiction of VisionQuest the other Stark AIs aid Vis in his quest to reconcile his identity and help him figure things out in the real world, as evidenced by a scene we watched being filmed, in which most of them attempt to decipher an important clue.

“He is forced out of this comfort zone and a very propulsive plot begins,” Bettany explained.

That means the real world still matters as an incident takes Vis from his UK hiding place to Madripoor. The fabled island nation of rogues and ruffians first glimpsed in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier makes its return in VisionQuest, although production designer Will Hughes-Jones told us those scenes were on a tight deadline as the standing location on the studio lot used to recreate Mardipoor would soon be needed by another production. Also, eagle-eyed viewers might recognize the set from another Marvel production. We won’t ruin the surprise, though.

Before making his way there, though, Vision will meet Thomas Shepard and his friend, Lisa Molinari. In his late teens or early twenties, Thomas will remind Vision of Tommy, his son within the Westview Hex. But is he, somehow, actually a Maximoff?

“The children of WandaVision didn’t really exist, or did they?” teased Matalas.

When we sat down to discuss Thomas, actor Ruaridh Mollica said the character knows who Vision is by virtue of growing up in the MCU, but he also has “these certain delusions; he sees them as maybe more linked to memories.”

Outside of that, Thomas is a “dynamic orphaned hustler” on the streets of London as the series begins. And once events are set in motion, Thomas and Vis must get to know each other.

For Bettany, “that sort of intergenerational stuff that happens between grandfather, father and son, if indeed a robot can have a son” is one of the most attractive things about VisionQuest, no matter who Thomas turns out to be. “[There are] really redolent of moments as a parent that you know, like teaching your son to drive and them crunching the gears or them not using their turn signal,” he said of the interactions between the characters. It becomes more complicated, of course, when the father figure is a robot and the potential son is scrapping by as an artful dodger.

And as Mollica added, “Thomas has grown up unable to accept family in a way… And he doesn’t really know Vision.” It leads to a journey of self-discovery for Thomas as well.

Lisa, meanwhile, is Thomas’s ride-or-die companion. As actor Lauren Morais put it, “They’re survivors and I think that’s why they both get along so well.”

The character is “a very passionate person” and a moral pickpocket. That is: she finds people who “deserve” to lose some belongings. Morais learned a few slight-of-hand skills to connect with the character, including balancing a two-pound coin on her knuckles. “I really want to master it so well I can have a pint and do it,” she joked.

Of the dynamic between Lisa and Thomas, the actor said, “We’ve been each other’s only family, each other’s only support through thick and thin. We get each other, we hate each other, we love each other.”

The cast also includes Matalas mainstay Todd Stashwick as a bounty hunter looking for Vision called Paladin, who Marvel Comics fans will definitely recognize; Diane Morgan as one of his associates; Faran Tahir as Raza, a part he originally played in Iron Man; Mary McDonnell in an as-yet unannounced role, and T’Nia Miller as Jocasta — a name that definitely means something to long-time Marvel fans. In the comics, she’s Ultron’s robot wife!

And with all the discussion of AI during the visit, Bettany was asked about his own relationship to the real world technology. “I don’t really have one that I know of,” he replied. “I’m such a philistine with all things technical, which is hilarious. Bear in mind I play a quantum processor.”

VisionQuest uploads its first two episodes to Disney+ on October 14.

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