Movies With Butter

It's still very early going behind the scenes of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, but even if he loves a good filmmaking secret, writer/director Joss Whedon isn't the type to keep everything firmly under wraps, a la J.J. Abrams. So while we wait to see an honest-to-gosh trailer, we can count on gobbling up a few morsels of information about the hotly anticipated Avengers sequel between now and 2015 -- such as the tidbits recently dropped by Whedon and James "Ultron" Spader.

In an interview with the UK's Independent, Spader confessed to a comics-deprived household growing up, but said he made up for his superhero poverty by having sleepovers at a friend's house -- and echoed the sentiments of many grown-up comics movie stars when he added, "I have three sons, and two of them have a great interest in comics so they’re excited I’m playing the role."

Spader also delved into the process of becoming Ultron a bit, revealing that Whedon would be using at least some mo-cap to animate the evil sentient robot: "Just this weekend I went in for them to take very extensive photographs, head scans, body scans, and all kinds of things in preparation for figuring out how the hell I’m gonna fit in this Ultron character!"

Meanwhile, Whedon spoke with Nerd HQ about his plans to expand Scarlett Johansson's role in the sequel, saying of her character, the morally ambiguous Black Widow, "She was the most fun for me because she's not a hero, you know, and it's something that I read -- and I feel bad that I can't remember who wrote the book -- but it's in one of the books explaining, 'These guys are heroes, you are a spy. It's a different thing -- it's a different skill set -- and you don't have their moral high ground or any of that good stuff.' And that just makes her so interesting to me. So yeah, the stuff I've got going on with her in the second one is killer."

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