Paul Bettany, who plays the Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, took some time to discuss what happened to his character in Avengers: Infinity War, including comparing it to his role as Dryden Vos in Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Spoiler warning for both movies!)
Bettany made these comments in an interview with GQ. The interviewer noted that between the two movies, he has actually managed to die three times over the course of one summer—once in Solo and twice in Infinity War. Upon asked which was his “favorite,” he cited the first from Infinity War.
“Ooh, I don’t know. I think that being murdered by the love of your life because you’re asking them to is pretty moving stuff that they wrote for us,” he said.
Bettany’s character is a robot given sapience via the Mind Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones that the Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin) comes to Earth to collect. “Vis” makes a noble but harrowing decision: he asks his love interest, Wanda Maximoff/the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) to destroy the Stone, killing him, in order to keep it away from Thanos.
She complies, but unfortunately for them and the rest of the universe, Thanos already has the Time Stone by then—as such, he simply rewinds time to before the Mind Stone was destroyed, bringing the Vision back to life. Then Thanos takes it, killing him once again. The guy just can’t win, can he?
Wanda and the Vision have a romantic history in the comic books as well, and their relationship in the films is one of the emotional highlights of the film. While Bettany says that he doesn’t not believe in “chemistry,” he admits that he and Olsen work well together, and that helped to sell the death scene.
This segment was pretty similar to another in the same movie, when Gamora (Zoe Saldana) asks her own love interest, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) to shoot her if she falls into Thanos’ hands, in this case to keep the Soul Stone from him. Like Wanda, he complies, but once again, Thanos prevents it—that time with the Reality Stone, which turns his bullets into bubbles.
Both deaths have a good chance of getting undone in next year’s fourth Avengers film, but for now fans are left wondering how it will happen.
