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Our 6 Casting Choices for Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch

Now that it’s been confirmed that mutant twins Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, will be appearing in The Avengers 2, we here at AP2HYC thought we would weigh in on which actors and actresses we’d like to see play the avenging mutant twins.

For those who don’t know, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff are the twin children of Magneto, who start off as members of his Brotherhood of Evil before having a change of heart and joining the Avengers. Pietro/Quicksilver has super speed while Wanda/Scarlet Witch wields destructive, bad-luck inducing hex bolts. Both have been popular characters over the years, often changing sides depending on the needs of the story, but almost always returning to the Avengers fold.

Rob and I spent a long time trying to come up with actors that would do well in the roles and from there, which would work well together. We decided to present our final choices as pairs, picking out which Pietros would go best with which Wandas.

Now, it is probably worth mentioning that most of what I (David) know about Pietro and Wanda comes from watching the X-Men: Evolution animated show and that I haven’t read many comics featuring the twins. Because of that, I tend to think of the twins as being on the younger side, and so are the actors I’ve selected.  Rob, meanwhile, chose slightly older and more established actors. Despite disagreeing on the age point, both Rob and I have approved all of the pairings below.

So, without further ado, here are our top choices to play Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch:

 

6. Stuart Townsend/Emily Deschanel

ST & ED

Townsend is mainly known as brooding immortal Dorian Gray in Stephen Norrington‘s disastrous The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a film so bad it retired Sean Connery and probably resulted in gypsy curses on half the board of 20th Century Fox courtesy of Alan Moore. On the other hand, he was the original choice for Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy before being replaced with Viggo Mortensen the day before filming after two months of rehearsals and training (and for which he received no monies – ouch). He has the cocky charm necessary for the Quicksilver character, but also the gravitas not to come across as insufferably smug.

The older Deschanel sister, meanwhile, has spent the last eight years playing brilliant but socially inept anthropologist Temperance Brennan on the Fox TV series Bones. Over the course of 166 episodes, she’s proven she can be devastatingly icy, but also desperately vulnerable. While Deschanel’s never been hugely tested in the action stakes, she could make for an interesting choice if Marvel choose to explore the more detached side of Scarlet Witch’s persona, though, given her salary of almost $200,000 for each episode on Bones — 22 a season! — she could prove deceptively expensive. Her pairing with Townsend may seem unexpected, but the chalk and cheese approach to the brother-sister duo could well pay off.

– Rob

About the author

Robert Wallis

You can also read Rob's work at www.ofallthefilmblogs.blogspot.com.

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