Paul Bettany has been playing a silly game with all of us for weeks.
The WandaVision star has spent the entire season of the hit Disney+ series teasing to various outlets that he would be acting with someone he had never acted with before. In his interview with E! News, when asked a mostly irrelevant question about which sitcom era was his favorite, this is what he said (and you can hear him say it in the video above):
"There's stuff that happens later on when we have caught up with time that I love equally. There's a huge reveal with an actor that I've always wanted to work with, and I have some real explosive scenes with him."
Many of us really ran with the idea that a male actor would be showing up who Bettany had never worked with before. "Has Paul Bettany ever shared scenes with Benedict Cumberbatch?!" we all wondered, throwing out actor names and potential characters all over the place.
Then, a major reveal happened at the end of episode eight. While the main Vision on WandaVision was actually a being fully created by Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and her magic, S.W.O.R.D. had been working on reviving his body. Revived Vision woke up at the end of the episode, and while he's probably not the same exact personality-filled Vision we know and love, he is still played by Bettany. And thus, the actor Bettany has always wanted to work with is Bettany himself.
The trickster confirmed the theory on Good Morning America.
"Yeah, you know when you think something's gonna be funny, and you say it, and then you actually panic about it?" he said. "[That's] what I did because fans started guessing who it might be, and they were guessing people like Benedict Cumberbatch or Patrick Stewart, and I was thinking, 'God, that's a good idea' and they're gonna be so disappointed when they find out it's me."
We're not even mad, honestly. We're more impressed. Bettany was asked if he might still be trolling fans, and he just pretended his feed had frozen. You can watch the video below.
At this point, there are so many theories—both credible and absolutely ludicrous—about what might happen on the WandaVision finale that we've fully lost track and are just happy to sit back and find out what happens, even if it was just Bettany all along.
Be sure to get fully caught up for the finale our WandaVision cheat sheet!
The WandaVision finale starts streaming Friday on Disney+.