Paul Bettany Teases The “Psychopath” Inside Vision’s Mind in Marvel’s VISIONQUEST
Paul Bettany is stepping back into synthezoid form for Marvel’s VisionQuest, and this time, he’s peeling back the layers of Vision’s mind revealing it’s far more chaotic than fans might imagine.
The upcoming Disney+ series dives deep into the fragmented consciousness of White Vision, exploring the mix of artificial intelligences, memories, and emotions that make up one of the MCU’s most complex characters.
Speaking with Collider after Marvel’s New York Comic Con panel, Bettany opened up about what fans can expect.
“One of the things that’s fun about that is that we finally get to see what it’s like inside Vision’s mind, and it’s more cluttered than you would think.”
He went on to describe how Vision has been holding onto various pieces of code and personalities.
“He’s clearly been saving and copying and pasting them to keep them alive inside his head. One of them, of course, has to be kept behind a pretty impressive firewall because he’s a psychopath. But he’s a clever one.”
That “psychopath,” of course, is Ultron, voiced once again by James Spader. Bettany confirmed that Vision’s mind houses several familiar AIs, including Iron Man’s robotic assistants DUM-E and U, who will both appear in the series.
The internal tug-of-war with Ultron highlights the ongoing struggle within Vision’s consciousness, a battle between creation and control, logic and emotion.
Created by Terry Matalas (Star Trek: Picard Season 3), VisionQuest continues the story left off after WandaVision. When audiences last saw White Vision, he had just regained access to all of his counterpart’s memories, including those from the Hex.
Bettany explained, “When we leave him, he’s given access to all of Red Vision’s memories, even his memories within the hex.”
He added, “Terry had a really great pitch for how he was going to… he’s struggling. White Vision is really struggling with how he was going to attach feeling to those memories.”
That emotional dissonance of having memories of love and loss without actually feeling them is at the heart of the series. Bettany praised Matalas’ visual storytelling and the creative team’s approach to bringing Vision’s mental landscape to life.
Alongside Bettany and Spader, the show features Emily Hampshire as E.D.I.T.H., T’Nia Miller as Jocasta, Todd Stashwick as Paladin, and Faran Tahir reprising his role as Raza. The series is directed by Christopher J. Byrne and Gandja Monteiro.
VisionQuest premieres on Disney+ in 2026, and it sounds like it will give us a thought-provoking character study and visually rich exploration of what it means to be human.