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When we first (and last) encountered E.D.I.T.H. in Spider-Man: Far From Home, the AI existed entirely through Tony Stark’s glasses, assisting Tom Holland’s Peter Parker while also giving him access to a frankly terrifying amount of firepower. In VisionQuest, she finally gets a body of her own, and Emily Hampshire takes full advantage of it.
Her E.D.I.T.H. is curious, impulsive and desperate to experience everything she has spent her existence only knowing about. There’s still plenty of Tony Stark in her, from the ego to the sense of humor, but Hampshire gives her an excitement about the world that makes her feel much younger than the enormous amount of knowledge she carries around.
The series picks up with Paul Bettany’s rebooted Vision hiding in Edinburgh and trying to make sense of the memories he inherited from his former self. Inside his programming is the Mindspace, a virtual home populated by human avatars of the Stark AIs that came before him, including J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), D.U.M.-E. (Henry Lewis), U. (Jonathan Sayer), E.D.I.T.H. and, locked away upstairs, James Spader’s Ultron. E.D.I.T.H.’s particular area of expertise is fun, although giving the AI who once controlled an army of weaponised drones responsibility for leisure was probably always going to produce some interesting results.
Hampshire, somewhat incredibly, was not much of a Marvel fan before getting the role.
“I am ashamed to say that I was not,” she tells us.
She responded by going all the way back to the beginning and watching the MCU properly for the first time.
“I think people should be jealous of it, because I got to watch everything for the first time now,” she says.
Two projects quickly became favourites. One was Spider-Man: Far From Home, for obvious reasons. The other was WandaVision.
“I think why I wasn’t a fan of it before was I just had the wrong idea about what a superhero movie was,” Hampshire says. “It was like my brother playing with action figures and I couldn’t play with them. And that’s not it at all.”
What changed her mind was realising how little the superheroics actually had to limit the kinds of stories Marvel could tell.
“At least the Marvel Universe, it’s like science fiction as this delivery system for human stories,” she says. “And it’s also really funny.”
Then came WandaVision.
“It’s some of the most brilliant writing and visuals I’ve ever seen,” she says, before adding with impeccable timing, “Until this show.”
There is another reason Hampshire ended up in VisionQuest. The series reunites her with creator Terry Matalas, more than a decade after the two first worked together on 12 Monkeys.
Hampshire played Jennifer Goines across all four seasons of Matalas’ Syfy series, taking a character originally conceived as a female variation on Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines from Terry Gilliam’s film and making her almost entirely her own. Matalas has spoken about how quickly Hampshire became inseparable from the character, while Hampshire has described the freedom he gave her to find Jennifer on set. When he began developing E.D.I.T.H. for VisionQuest, Hampshire says he could hear something of Jennifer in the character, which eventually brought the two of them back together.
It makes sense once you see her.
E.D.I.T.H. has some of Jennifer’s unpredictability, but Hampshire was equally concerned with making sure this wasn’t simply a new character borrowing the name of an old MCU AI.
In Far From Home, E.D.I.T.H. was Tony Stark’s augmented-reality security and defence system, left to Peter Parker after Stark’s death and accessed through a pair of glasses. The acronym itself is characteristically Tony: “Even Dead, I’m The Hero.” She was originally voiced by Marvel Studios editor Dawn Michelle King, with Hampshire becoming the first actor to physically embody her in VisionQuest.
For Hampshire, almost everything she needed was already there.
“Imagine being that person slash AI in those glasses and your kind of dad was Tony Stark, and he named you E.D.I.T.H. for ‘Even Dead, I’m The Hero,’” she says. “So, I know she’s got a bit of ego, and she wants to be the hero, and she’s got a bit of his snarky Stark humor.”
There is also the small matter of what Tony actually allowed her to control.
“She has access to all the most terrifying weapons, and he gives her to a teenager,” Hampshire laughs. “So that told me a lot.”
VisionQuest then asks a much more interesting question: what happens to an intelligence built entirely around serving other people when she suddenly has some freedom of her own?
“Now she’s been given autonomy, so who is that person when she’s set free and what would she want?”
Hampshire found her answer in the gap between knowing something and actually experiencing it.
“She has all the knowledge. She knows all the ingredients to the greatest pizza in the world and she doesn’t get to taste it,” she says. “So that’s all she wants, is to experience things and have fun.”
There is, of course, a slight problem.
“Her idea of fun is blowing things up.”
That contradiction makes E.D.I.T.H. incredibly fun to watch. She can tell you practically anything, access technology capable of catastrophic damage and process information faster than anybody in the room, but emotionally she is discovering things for the first time.
Hampshire describes the difference between the two versions of E.D.I.T.H. in much simpler terms.
“I really wanted E.D.I.T.H. we meet in VisionQuest to be the same E.D.I.T.H. as Spider-Man: Far From Home,” she says. “There, E.D.I.T.H. is in her very corporate job where she can’t do anything and can’t have fun.”
“This is E.D.I.T.H. on the weekend, set free.”
It would have been easy to play that freedom as a series of robotic mannerisms, particularly in a show filled with characters who are constantly questioning where programming ends and personhood begins. Hampshire went the other way.
“I didn’t go at it trying to play a robot,” she says. “I did what I always do. My job is to find the humanity in the character.”
Usually that means understanding what a person wants or what they are afraid of. With E.D.I.T.H., Hampshire simply applied the same question to an AI.
“What must it be like to be an AI?” she remembers thinking. “And kind of imagine from there.”
The answer became surprisingly emotional. E.D.I.T.H. knows what an experience is. She can presumably access every description, image, review and piece of data associated with it. None of that means she has ever actually had one.
“You can know about somebody’s experience, but having it is so intangible until you touch it and have it,” Hampshire says.
It gave her a strange reversal of the way we normally talk about artificial intelligence.
“Everything in playing E.D.I.T.H. made me feel more alive than I’ve ever played in any other part, because I guess you always want what you don’t have,” she says.
“When you are human, like we are, we want to be smarter, know more, optimise and outsource our things into devices. And an AI already has all that. They want to feel alive.”
That idea runs through VisionQuest well beyond E.D.I.T.H. Vision has surrounded himself with artificial intelligences that look human, dress like humans, argue like humans and have somehow fallen into the kinds of roles any slightly dysfunctional family eventually does.
Hampshire says those relationships became clear almost immediately.
The actors had two days together rehearsing in the Mindspace before filming, and she quickly began thinking of each AI according to their place in the family.
“J.A.R.V.I.S. is security, big brother vibes,” she says. “F.R.I.D.A.Y. is socialisation, so she’s very like mom vibes.”
D.U.M.-E. and U.?
“The pets.”
E.D.I.T.H. is the teenager.
“She’s just been given a body and she wants to experience everything, and everything is so big and dramatic and exciting.”
And then there’s Ultron.
“I would say he’s probably the black sheep of the family.”
It is a particularly funny way of describing a genocidal artificial intelligence, but the strange family dynamic is one of the things VisionQuest has the most fun with. Vision created the Mindspace to help himself better understand humanity, only to fill it with personalities who have developed needs, rivalries and insecurities of their own. Reviews have particularly singled out the AI ensemble, with Hampshire’s relentlessly enthusiastic E.D.I.T.H. emerging as one of its standouts.
Our conversation eventually moves away from Marvel entirely when we ask Hampshire our signature question: if she could be any single shot in a film, which one would she choose?
She barely has to think before arriving at Xavier Dolan’s Mommy.
For most of Dolan’s 2014 film, the image is confined to an unusually narrow 1:1 square. Then, during its now-famous “Wonderwall” sequence, Antoine Olivier Pilon’s Steve reaches toward the edges of the frame and physically pushes them apart as the image expands into widescreen. It remains one of the film’s most exhilarating moments, a brief burst of possibility in a story where happiness rarely lasts for long.
“That’s the shot I would probably be,” Hampshire says.
“You feel it. You feel kind of the breaking free in that.”
Hampshire knows Dolan personally. She appeared in his English-language feature The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, but their friendship goes back even further, to a wonderfully small Montreal filmmaking world where many of the same people kept finding their way into one another’s work.
That connection is coming around again with Heated Rivalry. Hampshire is joining the second season of Jacob Tierney’s breakout series as Vanessa, a character from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels and a close friend of Fabian.
Hampshire and Tierney have worked together repeatedly over the years, including on his 2010 thriller Good Neighbours. Dolan, then still at the very beginning of his career after I Killed My Mother, had a small role in the film alongside Hampshire.
Hampshire remembers Tierney seeing Dolan’s work and immediately recognising something in him.
“He was like, ‘This kid’s amazing,’” she recalls.
Dolan ended up appearing in a scene with them. Then, while moving out of his place, he suddenly had nowhere to stay.
“So he came and stayed at my place,” Hampshire says. “This kid I just met, he was like a teenager, and he didn’t leave.”
She laughs.
“And that’s how we became friends.”
VisionQuest is now streaming on Disney+.
