WARNING: This Article May Contain Spoilers
The beauty of casting Paul Bettany as Vision is that from Iron Man until Avengers: Age of Ultron, he was the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S (Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System, what an original name). For those who don’t know, he is the internal system in all of Tony Stark’s Iron Man suits and becomes the hero Vision thanks to Stark and Banner merging his technology with the Mind Infinity stone – geek lesson over. For me, it would have been weird for someone else to take the role of Vision, having heard Bettany’s voice for so many films.
Legion
You know what, when you look at the poster for this film – you would expect Bettany’s character will be pretty big. Especially as he is starring as the Archangel Michael. However, they made him a slightly smaller role in comparison to Jeep and Charlie but I have no issue with this. If you think about it, the focus being on the other characters more than on Michael, makes his scenes even more intense. In my opinion, this is possibly the most bad-ass role I’ve known Bettany to play and it totally worked. You just have to watch the scene of him saving Audrey to know what I mean.
Master and Commander
I think a lot of people will disagree with when I say that Bettany’s role in this film is important. Come on, he may not be the main focus of the majority of the film but in the end it is he who gives Lucky Jack the idea of how to trick the French. I’m not sure if it’s deliberate that they made Steven a little bit of a Darwin-esque character but I think it really works. On top of this, I love the way Jack and Steven play off of each other and I think the mild sarcastic tone contained in Bettany’s voice adds to it.
Side Note (and possibly my favourite fact about this whole film): Paul Bettany actually learnt how to play the cello for his role as Steven – just unfortunately the music you hear is not directly from him playing.
Margin Call
This, like many Wall Street films, I didn’t one hundred percent understand what was going on most of the time. Anyway, not the point. I have one burning question about this film. Is Bettany supposed to be American or not? He clearly isn’t trying to put on an accent but what’s weird, and it could be my hearing, but there’s certain times that instead of sounding English – he sounds American. This isn’t a complaint, I find it quite impressive because there’s been a few actors that can’t always pull off an American accent. I don’t know how, but this guy seems to excel at playing the ancillary characters. There’s something about him in this that I’m not sure whether you’re supposed to trust him or not but that seems to be deliberate as everyone has some sort of an agenda.
Honorary Mentions
I know I said that Bettany’s role as Michael in Legion is one is his most bad-ass roles but I guess when you put it up against his role in Priest then you have a real decision on your hands. There’s a picture that went up on social media not too long ago that the first time people ‘met’ Paul Bettany was when he starred as Vision but I, like the person who created image, first ‘met’ him when he played Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale. This also isn’t the only time he’s turned his hand to playing historical characters as he played Charles Darwin in Creation and Prince William of Orange in an episode of Sharpe.
