Why did director Joss Whedon pursue only Kick-Ass' Aaron Taylor-Johnson for the role of Quicksilver for Age of Ultron?
"He is an old-school movie star. Pietro has always been kind of a dick. Aaron is so beautiful—like sculpture beautiful—that you buy him as somebody who's going to be a little arrogant," Whedon told Buzzfeed. "He's not as a person. He's a dear. He works his ass off. But I knew that he could play that guy."
But it took about a year for Taylor-Johnson to decide whether or not he wanted to join the MCU, explaining, "You've got such a huge cast, what the hell difference is it going to make if I come on the scene? So it was the character and that took about a year of going back and forth about it. It took a while but I'm super happy to be in that one."
One reason he ended up signing on was because his onscreen wife in the Godzilla reboot, Elizabeth Olsen, was set to play Quicksilver's twin sister.
However, expectations were already high for the speedy superhero, thanks to Evan Peters' breakout and beloved turn as the character in X-Men: Days of Future Past, with Whedon admitting he was a fan of the sequence, but "I was never thrilled."
Still, Taylor-Johnson, who is friends with Peters, wasn't too concerned.
"I think the X-Men movies are great. I don't fear things like that. I feel like without Scarlet Witch, you haven't really got Quicksilver," he told Buzzfeed. "We're not just, like, a little moment in this. We have a story. We have a history. Yeah, OK, he's fast as fuck, but who cares? It's just a super power, you know?
And, in a meta twist, Peters made a surprise appearance on Disney+'s WandaVision as a "re-cast" Quicksilver. Talk about a multiverse.