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Lauren Morais had only been a Marvel fan for around two years when she found herself auditioning for an “Untitled Marvel Project.”
Her way into the MCU had been fairly recent. On a train from Cardiff to London, her partner convinced her to give Agatha All Along a try, telling her it was “fun, camp, witches, but also very deep.” Morais “absolutely devoured it,” then worked backwards through WandaVision, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Endgame.
“I thought WandaVision was such a poignant story about grief and survival,” says Morais. “There were so many strong women that I saw that I just loved.”
So, when the self-tape arrived, she already had a pretty good idea of what it might be.
“I had a little inkling that it was VisionQuest because I was a fan of Agatha All Along and WandaVision, but I didn’t know for sure,” she says.
The audition gave almost nothing away. Morais was sent scenes for the mysterious project, fell in love with the character and was eventually called in to read with the casting director. She left convinced she hadn’t done particularly well.
“As actors, we’re all so annoying,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘I did a rubbish job. Rubbish.’”
A week later, she was at Pinewood for a chemistry read with Ruaridh Mollica, who plays Tommy on the show. Then came another. It wasn’t until one of the producers finally showed her an image of Lisa Molinari that everything started falling into place.
“She had so many arms and a really cool coat, and I was like, ‘Yes, I really want to do this.’”
Morais got the role. That night she was at a cast dinner. The next day she was at the read-through, followed almost immediately by rehearsals and filming.
“It was amazing and so overwhelming.”
Lisa makes quite an impression when she arrives in VisionQuest. A pickpocket with an exceptionally quick read on everyone around her, she is resourceful, funny and considerably softer than she first allows people to see.
Morais calls her “a survivor.”
“She’s very hard-hitting on the outside, but full of empathy and has a lot of love for the people she trusts,” she says. “She can improv really fast and she can get out of situations.”
Morais thinks Lisa would be particularly useful in an escape room.
“She’d solve it in like 20 minutes, while I’m someone that will sit there thinking a lot,” she laughs.
“She’s a cool survivor girl with a big heart.”
There was still plenty about Lisa that Morais had to work out for herself.
In the comics, Lisa Molinari is better known as Coat of Arms, an artist who eventually puts together her own version of the Young Avengers. She also has history with Tommy, aka Speed, and the two have a complicated relationship. Lisa has never been particularly interested in following the rules of what a superhero is supposed to look like, which gives her a slightly different edge from some of the more traditional heroes around her.
VisionQuest gives Morais considerably more room to establish who Lisa was before any of that.
It started with her voice.
Morais auditioned for much of the process using an Essex accent. Later rounds included northern English and American versions before Fran, a member of the show’s hair and makeup team, suggested they let Morais try Welsh.
She did, and when the time came for the cast read-through, Morais decided to push it a little further.
“I just did it in my Welsh accent because I was like, ‘I’m gonna take a chance, and I think it’ll be a cool accent to have alongside Ruaridh’s [Scottish accent],’” she remembers. “I went to Terry [Matalas, the showrunner] in the Welsh accent and he was like, ‘I love it. Go for it.’”
And so Lisa was now from Cardiff.
Morais, who is from Cardiff herself, started filling in everything around that decision.
“I started developing her backstory coming from Cardiff, which is where I’m from, and how she got to London,” she says.
In the history Morais created for her, Lisa grew up an orphan and became a pickpocket in Cardiff. Eventually, being known around such a relatively small city made it harder to survive the way she had been surviving.
“She’s such an adventurer that she ended up in London, and then you meet her on the bus with Tommy.”
Morais even carried that history into Lisa’s wardrobe, asking costume designer Sarah Young to give her a Welsh lovespoon.
“That was a connection to Cardiff and a connection to Lisa,” she says. “I made that about her mum that she never met and things like that.”
“So it really, really started with the Welshness of Lisa, and Terry and Marvel letting me go for it.”
Morais has spoken elsewhere about how meaningful it was to bring that part of herself into something as big as the MCU. She attended Welsh-medium schools and took part in Eisteddfod competitions growing up and has described seeing Lisa become a Cardiff character as particularly special.
That history also gave Morais an immediate connection between Lisa and Tommy.
When they first meet, neither of them has much in the way of family. They’re both used to figuring things out themselves, and the bus scene that introduces their relationship has an ease to it that makes sense long before either character knows exactly what the other will become.
It was also one of the first things Morais and Mollica filmed together.
“We were both starting this journey in the MCU together, so we really had each other’s back,” Morais says. “Even from the chemistry reads, we weren’t afraid and we played a lot.”
Their first scenes as Lisa and Tommy also happened to coincide with Morais and Mollica properly getting to know each other.
“I believe our first scene was the bus scene, which I think maybe Chris did on purpose,” she says, referring to director Christopher J. Byrne. “Our first scenes getting to know each other as Tommy and Lisa were Lauren and Ruaridh getting to know each other as well.”
The production helped. Rather than placing the actors in front of an empty green screen, the bus was surrounded by screens that gave them something much closer to the finished environment.
“We felt like we were actually in it,” Morais says.
And Mollica made keeping a straight face fairly difficult.
“He’s actually so hilarious. The amount of times that we were absolutely cackling on that bus. It was so fun.”
That chemistry becomes increasingly important as VisionQuest goes on.
Lisa and Tommy meet at a point where both have learned not to expect very much from other people. Their friendship initially makes practical sense. But Morais doesn’t think practicality fully explains why they attach themselves to each other so quickly.
“Sometimes you meet those people in life where you can’t explain it, but there’s an instant connection and you start speaking about the big things quite quickly,” she says.
She points back to their first conversation on the bus. Neither has to give the other a complete history before they begin recognising something familiar.
“She doesn’t need to know his whole life,” Morais says. “They mirror each other in the way they speak very easily.”
“When you both have maybe had similar situations in life, you don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty. You understand each other.”
Lisa also knows how to reach Tommy when his anxiety takes over.
“I really love how she’s able to talk him down from his panic attacks because I think she sees herself in him,” Morais says. “She’s like, ‘I’ve been there,’ and she can have a joke about it.”
“When you go through very tough things in life, sometimes it’s better to have a laugh.”
Things become more difficult once Tommy begins learning the truth about his family.
For Lisa, the possibility that Tommy may have found his father doesn’t just change his life. It complicates something she thought belonged to both of them.
“She finds her person in Tommy,” Morais says.
“Her only person in this crazy world.”
“And then she finds out that Tommy has a father, and her reconciling with that and being like, ‘Well, this was the connection we had. We’re both orphans and we both don’t know what’s going on in the world. Now you have a dad and I don’t have that.’”
It leaves Lisa having to reconsider who she is at almost exactly the same time Tommy is doing the same.
Morais found plenty of that uncertainty in the comics too.
“I think even in the comics, she’s so forthright and she’s always thinking about what a superhero is and what’s villainy,” she says. “I kind of brought that into her character in this series.”
“She wrestles with a lot, and I think she does in the series as well, with the feelings of, ‘Who am I? What am I?’ at the same time as Tommy, but she always supports Tommy.”
“That’s what I really like about her. She’s complicated.”
That last word probably sums Lisa up better than anything.
She steals, but she has rules about who she steals from. She is fiercely independent but becomes deeply attached to Tommy. She questions heroes and villains rather than automatically trusting either side. And anyone familiar with Coat of Arms already knows there is plenty Marvel could still explore if Lisa sticks around.
In the comics, Coat of Arms and Speed already know each other from their juvenile detention days, and Lisa’s attraction to him becomes tangled up with the conflict between her own Young Avengers and the established team. Marvel’s original Dark Reign: Young Avengers run even ends by teasing whether “Speed and Coat” will ultimately get together.
Morais certainly hopes VisionQuest isn’t the end.
“I’m really hoping that we get to see more of the character because who she is in the comics is very exciting,” she says.
For now, though, she seems particularly fond of the Lisa who existed before all of those possibilities opened up. The Cardiff girl on a London bus, picking pockets, talking her new friend through a panic attack and making decisions about right and wrong according to a moral code entirely of her own.
At the end of our conversation, we ask Morais our signature question: if she could be a single shot from any film or series, what would it be?
She takes a moment.
Then she lands on Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days.
The film follows Hirayama, played by Kōji Yakusho, through his daily life in Tokyo, finding enormous pleasure in routines that might appear insignificant to almost anybody else. For Morais, it’s one of the film’s driving sequences that immediately comes to mind.
“It has to be in Perfect Days, in the car, going down the highway in Tokyo and the music blasting,” she says. “Just being happy and present in life, happy about the little things.”
“I just love that film so much. That peace of being present,” she says. “I think that’s the shot that springs to mind right now.”
VisionQuest is now streaming on Disney+.
