It’s fair to say that this year is going to be the biggest one of Paul Bettany’s career. As well as appearing once again in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Vision, 2018 also sees him debut across in the Star Wars franchise, where he appears in May’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. While he remains completely sworn to secrecy in relation to the fine details behind both projects (his Solo character has still not yet been revealed), he did manage to drop a few hints about the secrecy and scale of the filming that is being put into the production of Avengers: Infinity War.
Bettany sat down recently for an interview with Total Film, which the magazine published in last month’s publication. The majority of the topics that were covered in the piece were in relation to Solo, and the new cinematic adaptation of Journey’s End (which is released this month), but Bettany couldn’t help but chat to the interviewer about the filming of the upcoming Marvel epic.
Even though he’s a been a part of the MCU for the last seven years, Bettany still remains over-awed by the sheer amount of work going into the filming of Infinity War. When asked about the other professionals he was working with on the project, this was his reply:
“It was insane. There were like major movie stars on that film, and they were referred to as like “number 36’. It’s crazy.”
When pressed, he also had this to say about the insane scale of the resources that Disney have plowed into the biggest MCU movie to date:
“Then there’s the fact that I woke up, and I knew we were shooting in the middle of nowhere .We were shooting an outdoors scene, and we started to descend down into this valley. There’s this f-cking town, and I was like “Where the f-ck is this?” I got my phone out and there was nothing there, and that’s when I realized there were no buildings, it was all trailers. I’ve been making movies for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything that big or bonkers in my life…”
But the most interesting part of the interview came when the actor revealed the lengths that the film’s directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, were going to try and avoid details of the project leaking out into the media:
“When I read the script there were fake scenes in it. I got the directors on the phone and they walked me through what were the fake scenes. They’d had three leaks already, so they’d written a script with lots of fake scenes. There were three Hero iPads that had the only real script on them.”
The recent teaser trailer that was revealed for the movie has already showcased just how much Bettany’s Vision will play an integral role in the Infinity War story. His character is shown in a new human form, continuing to build on the (uncomfortable) romance he had struck up with Elizabeth Olson’s Scarlet Witch back during the events of Captain America: Civil War.
There’s also the small fact that Vision happens to be in possession of the Mind Stone, which Mad Titan Thanos needs to fully complete his legendary Infinity Gauntlet. The footage appears to show a sequence in which a member of Thanos’s Black Order (potentially Corvus Glaive) brutally removes the stone from Vision’s head by force.
Over in Solo, it’s believed that Bethany’s character is an intergalactic gangster, and possibly the villain of the piece. Under original Solo directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Bettany’s role was initially planned to be totally CGI, with Michael K Williams providing the dialogue. When the two Lego Movie directors were fired, and replaced by Ron Howard, Bettany was then bought on board to play a human version of the character for the movie’s re-shoots.
Infinity War will land in theaters on May 4th, with Solo: A Star Wars Story due to be released the a little after on May 25th.