Avengers’ Aaron Taylor-Johnson isn’t threatened by X-Men’s Quicksilver

Aaron Taylor-Johnson will be Quicksilver in the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron film by director Joss Whedon. His character is Scarlet Witch’s brother, and they both are twins. Check out the new and lengthy interview Taylor-Johnson did with Collider where he talks about his character’s accent, shooting in slo-mo, and more about his character.

With Quicksilver already making an appearance in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, many are wondering whether Whedon’s version will be able to raise the bar. Taylor-Johnson says that he doesn’t feel threatened.

“I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t really know. That’s more of a Joss question. When the job came around, it was already out there, I think it was already shooting, so it wasn’t like ‘oh, should I really be taking on the character this early?” He continues, “You look at the two different universes, I didn’t feel like we felt at all threatened, nor do we feel like we’re saying that’s you know the wrong thing, it’s just that’s one thing and we’re doing something different. I haven’t watched it to kind of be like ‘oh, they’re doing the slo-mo super speed kind of action shots.'”

He then talks about how both he and Olsen had to coach each other with their dialect, since they are both twins from Eastern Europe.

“Me and Lizzy [Elizabeth Olsen] have been doing dialect coaching together and trying to get that to sound similar considering that we’re playing twins, brother and sister. But you know, her being American and me British. But yeah, it’s fun.”

Taylor-Johnson talks about what he had to do to achieve the look of someone running fast.

“That’s the great thing with these things, with new powers, that you really can kind of play with that sort of stuff. We did a lot of testing. The first time we did a running test I was like this running machine, but it was this huge, Lorre sized rig, it was the width of this, it was something they sped up and it was a great big running machine.”

He continues by explaining how they went from green screen to shooting at high frame rates.

“And they had me on a harness and a green screen, and they put it sort of on an incline and I ran on that. But what it did, it didn’t really give a sense that anything was really traveling. When you played it back, it looked too clean and neat, it didn’t really look real. When we did some stuff on the road, and they shot it 120 frames per second, and they’re on a truck and they’re driving and I sprint for a hundred meters.”

Taylor-Johnson talks about his character’s humor and how he and Olsen don’t want the accents to be unintentionally funny.

“The thing is with the Marvel universe in general is that everything’s not taken seriously. There are points when there’s real drama, but I love that there’s a lot of sarcasm and humor to it and people have that moment of humor. So it’s fun. What we didn’t want from me and Lizzie’s standpoint is for our accents to be the humorous thing.”

On the characters bickering back and forth.

“You know, it’s always that kinda great thing where they have characters go head to head and bicker with one another, and I don’t want to say who, but it’s nice to have like…yeah, there’s a lot of humor in it.”

For those of you complaining about the costumes, Taylor-Johnson says that since the characters are civilians, they wardrobe of choice will be more normal.

“I’m just more of a civilian really. Like I said, they’re more like Eastern European like travelers and you know, picking up clothes as they go along, you know. And I can’t really say too much about it, but yeah I think the way that we’ve designed picking out the costumes is with that kind of thought in mind.”

Even though his character is a civilian, he will have the sports style.

“You know, like I think some of the things I wear is a lot more kind of sporty, you know long-sleeve, a cycle top, sort of compression T-shirts and things like that, that get that kind of physique and sense and idea of it.”

Are you excited to see how Joss Whedon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson pull off Quicksilver?

Avengers: Age of Ultron hits theaters on May 1, 2015.