A large number of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s marquee superheroes are either humanoids wearing costumes with CGI enhancements or fully-digital creations, so the ones who have to truly suffer for their art are the unsung heroes of the franchise, even if Paul Bettany has admitted that he flipped out after getting irritated at the amount of time spent in his makeup chair for WandaVision.
It’s all well and good for Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle and even Tom Holland to a certain extent, who get to parade around on set wearing snug motion capture leotards. On the other side of the coin, the likes of Bettany, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana and Karen Gillan need to spend hours upon hours being seen to by a team of experts before they can even shoot a single frame of footage.
In fact, Bautista has cited the mixture of dread and exhaustion that comes with every outing as Drax as one of the major driving forces behind his decision to retire from the role after Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and based on his comments in a new interview, it sounds as though Bettany finally had enough of having his Vision getup painstakingly applied on a daily basis.
“I guess I had one time where I flipped out on set and I just went ‘somebody has to help me get out of this suit’, and they pulled it down and everybody was really lovely. It’s so embarrassing to talk about because obviously you’re getting paid to wear an uncomfortable suit but after five days in a row of just being encased in this thing you’re like ‘I gotta get it off my chest’. I sat there for like five, ten minutes just breathing, and then we went back into it and it was fine. That was the one time I think I flipped out. I’m mostly kind of chill, calm.”
It was just a minor blip in the grand scheme of things, with the typically gentlemanly Bettany no doubt apologizing profusely in the aftermath. The bad news is that Vision’s fate was left very much up in the air when WandaVision concluded, with the SWORD-sponsored version flying off into the ether having regained his own consciousness, so he’ll almost certainly be going through it all over again in the future.
