Both Joss Whedon and Robert Downey Jr. sat down with SciFiNow Magazine to discuss the upcoming Avengers sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron. They speak on the new villain Ultron, the new cast members Scarlet Witch (played by Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and our favorite science bros – Tony Stark and Bruce Banner.
To read the full article and interviews, check out the upcoming issue (104) of SciFiNow Magazine.
Downey Jr. on Tony Stark’s notoriously big ego:
Well, he winds up getting everyone into trouble, but he’s not doing it for selfish reasons. He’s doing it because he’s got a big idea, which is that the Avengers put themselves out of a job by creating a situation that will keep the world safe.
Additionally, he had this to say on the expanded friendship of Bruce Banner and Tony Stark:
It’s clear that Mark (Ruffalo) and I had chemistry in the first (The Avengers) movie, and so we’re expanding on that. Mark is actually more like the character he plays — [minus] the big green guy. I mean, you could ask him anything that Bruce Banner would be interested in and he can talk about it. He’s actually out there trying to impact things, and he knows what he’s talking about.
When asked if they successfully kicked it up a notch, Joss had this to say:
It’s more about feeling different than about necessarily being bigger. I mean, I would have no problem if this film were shorter than the first one. It won’t be, because I just have way too many characters, but at the same time, nobody was looking towards bigger. We were looking towards recapturing what people loved about the first one and then doing something very different with that feeling. The fact that we got to shoot all over the world and the fact that it just has a very different palette and the fact that we could go bonkers with some of our sequences meant that it does play, I think, at a slightly higher intensity. But if the emotional intensity is higher then that won’t really matter.
Joss on Ultron’s terrifying instability:
Ultron has been such a mainstay villain, and because he’s a robot he’s very different from Loki, and he also gives a chance to create a character – actually, I should say create with James and ILM [visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic] – a character that really is unique, that shares an ability with Loki to get inside the Avengers and call them on their bullshit, but unlike Loki, he’s actually just not stable! He is brilliant, but a little unhinged, and there is opportunities for a king of humor that you don’t usually get to play with for artificial intelligence, and at the same time he’s the big, eight-foot metal guy. He’s very imposing. And that combination of James Spader’s idiosyncratic, extraordinary wandering mind inside this towering, terrifying body is just a delight.
Lastly, on the newest super powered members of the cast, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, he had this to say:
They are phenomenal, those two, they have enormous gravitas and they are harboring a lot of anger. The characters, I mean Lizzie and Aaron, are absolute goofballs. But then when the camera rolls, they whip out the cheekbones and glare into the lens, and you’re like, ‘Ooh, nooo, don’t be mad at me’. You know, they really invested in the pain that drives these kids, and were never afraid to go to a dark place with them and then work from there, which is exciting, because they are a very different flavor to we’ve experienced with this kind of stuff.
