Happy Birthday Marvelous Paul Bettany!
Is there something special about today, Thursday, May 27th, 2021, Marvel Blog True Believers? Over there, on the calendar, there’s a little heart on today’s date. We know our readers are incapable of forgetting, so we guess we’ll just spoil it for you: May 27th is the one and only Paul Bettany’s birthday!
Photo: Marvel Studios
Happy Birthday Paul Bettany
You might have forgotten, but Bettany has been around since the very beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: he first appeared as JARVIS in 2008’s Iron Man.
No, not that JARVIS! Agent Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Jarvis (James D’Arcy). Photo: Amazon
He returned as JARVIS, the artificial intelligence who assists Tony Stark from within his power suit, in several more movies, including (but not limited to) 2010’s Iron Man 2 and 2012’s The Avengers.
Photo: Marvel Studios
Then, in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, he made the leap from voice-over to live action, becoming the android Vision!
After appearing as the Vision in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, it seemed as though it might be the end of the line for Vision…
Photo: UniVision
But as 2020’s WandaVision proved, sometimes dead is better (especially if S.W.O.R.D. has plans to turn you into a post-mortem weapon of mass destruction).
Photo: Marvel Studios
Nevertheless, at the conclusion of WandaVision’s fourth wall smashing first season, Bettany is playing the Ship of Theseus’d version of the Vision, who is currently at large in the wider MCU… and hopefully heading of the West Coast!
Plenty of Other Appearances
Plus, Bettany is a busy actor, appearing in many other movies over the years.
In 2001, he appeared in the Ron Howard directed movie A Beautiful Mind, about the real-life mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe, who is rumored to be heading to the MCU himself soon).
Photo: Universal Pictures
And that wasn’t the only time Bettany’s career overlapped with Howard’s, as the pair also worked together on 2018’s Solo, in which Bettany played the villainous Dryden Vos.
Dryden Vos in Solo Guidebook. Photo: Lucasfilm
Vision Wasn’t Born Yesterday
Will you be celebrating Bettany’s birthday with a rewatch of a MCU movie, Solo, or a WandaVision marathon on Disney+ (possibly accompanied with some breakfast for dinner)? Let us know what you’re planning in the comment section, Marvel Blog True Believers!
