The actor told Collider at New York Comic Con that he studied old Young Avengers comics to prepare for playing Tommy Shepard, the speedster twin of Wanda Maximoff's son Billy.
Marvel's Young Avengers puzzle just got one more piece locked in. Ruaridh Mollica, who plays Tommy Shepard in the upcoming Disney+ series VisionQuest, has confirmed on record that his character is Speed, the super-fast half of Wanda Maximoff's twin sons, and that he leaned hard on the comics to get there.
Speaking to Collider's Maggie Lovitt at New York Comic Con, Mollica said he went out and bought the Young Avengers back issues before shooting began. "I literally bought them," he said, pointing to one cover featuring him alongside Wiccan and another showing Tommy "in like an office, like yawning at his desk." His logic was simple: no better way to understand a character than to see how he was written on the page.
That's a bigger deal than it might sound. Marvel has been assembling this team in slow motion for the better part of six years, dropping in Kate Bishop, Cassie Lang and Billy Maximoff across different shows and films without ever quite saying the words Young Avengers out loud. Billy already made his comeback through Agatha All Along, where Joe Locke plays him. Tommy's arrival through VisionQuest fills in the other half of that pair, and Mollica putting the Speed name on record himself closes off any ambiguity about where the character is headed.
Who Tommy Is When We Meet Him
According to Mollica, VisionQuest doesn't hand Tommy his memory or his powers on a plate. He's introduced as Thomas Shepard, a young grifter scraping by in London who has no idea he's connected to Wanda, Vision or anything that happened during WandaVision. What he does have are dreams, recurring ones, of a family he can't place and doesn't understand.
"I think everyone just wants to be seen and be noticed, and I think that's who Tommy is as well," Mollica told Collider, describing a kid who's never really had a family and is now haunted by glimpses of one that might not even be real. The pitch, in his words, comes down to wanting love and wanting to be reunited.
That framing lines up with where the show's logline leaves Vision himself. After the body-restoring events of earlier storylines, Vision is in hiding from people who want to use him as a weapon. Searching for some sense of purpose, he starts consulting the AI personalities running in his own programming, before a bounty forces him onto the road with a mysterious boy who may or may not be his reincarnated son. That boy, obviously, is Tommy.
What's still not locked down is exactly how early in the season the Speed reveal lands, or how much of his comic book arc the show plans to use beyond the sibling bond with Billy. Mollica's comments confirm the destination. The route is still Marvel's to reveal, one VisionQuest episode at a time on Disney+.
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