Six episodes into VisionQuest, it's clear Marvel’s latest show has a lot going on. In addition to seeing the evolution of characters like Vision (Paul Bettany) and Ultron (James Spader), we saw the death of J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), and the rebirth of Tommy Maximoff (Ruaridh Mollica). The show is also giving us the origins of Jocasta (T’Nia Miller), Paladin (Todd Stashwick), and Lisa Molinari (Lauren Morais), the latter becomes the character Coat of Arms in Marvel Comics.
In the comic books, Lisa Molinari is also linked to Tommy Maximoff, having spent time with him in a juvenile detention center. Once released, she struggles to adjust to life in the real world until she discovers a magical cloak named Tiboro's Coat, which grants her the ability to fly and, more notably, four extra arms. Adopting the identity Coat of Arms, Lisa joins the villain team the Young Masters, though her allegiance is often shifting in the comics from good to evil to somewhere in between.
Part of the reason for her ambiguous loyalties is that she views the hero/villain struggle as a kind of performance art, which makes her very unpredictable. In VisionQuest, we have yet to see Lisa Molinari with any extra appendages, but in one of the trailers, she is shown with two extra robotic arms coming out of what looks like a high-tech backpack. This means Coat of Arms, or at least some early version of her, is coming.
And, when Lauren Morais sat down with Polygon, that’s precisely what we wanted to talk about. Polygon: When you got cast as Lisa Molinari, what kind of research did you do? Lauren Morais: I read the comics, which gave really good insight into her.
What got me the most was the fact that she was an artist, and how she sees superheroes as almost performance art. I used that and her questioning of that. She's quite a tough cookie, but also she has an empathetic side to her.
It’s mostly the comics, but then getting to know Ruaridh while doing the scenes helped. Lisa and Tommy were getting to know each other, that was the start of it, and I think it was a very appropriate and useful start to the whole process. Lisa is a character that’s been a villain, a hero, and an anti-hero.
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