Emily Hampshire plays E.D.I.T.H. on VisionQuest, a new Marvel show on Disney+.DUANE COLE/JOBFlocks
It’s not so hard to get into the mind and motivation of an artificial intelligence, says Emily Hampshire – who plays a spunky one named E.D.I.T.H in the new Marvel Television series VisionQuest that starts streaming Oct. 14 on Disney+.
“If you’re an AI, you’re basically a codependent: You’re just constantly used as a tool to execute whatever the person wants, and if you’re not useful, you’re thrown out,” the Canadian actor says during an afternoon interview at a Toronto hotel, where she’s being shuffled back and forth from journalist to influencer during a junket.
“What would someone like that want? To be alive, to experience things, to have agency.”
In a way then, it sounds like life as an AI is not all that different from life as an actor – waiting to be called into action to execute another person’s vision.
That can be tough, but it’s not at the moment for Hampshire – who, like AI, is popping up on screens everywhere you look right now.
Her role as E.D.I.T.H comes sandwiched between two Canadian shows on Crave this season.
On the hangout comedy Slo Pitch (currently streaming new episodes Friday), Hampshire plays Leanne – the musical-theatre loving former girlfriend and current beer league softball rival of lead Jess Salgueiro.
Hampshire and some of the cast of Slo Pitch. Hampshire plays Leanne, ex-girlfriend and beer-league rival of lead Jess Salgueiro.Crave/The Canadian Press
In the next instalment of Heated Rivalry coming in spring, meanwhile, she will be a character named Vanessa who runs a Toronto sex shop and blogs about sex toys.
E.D.I.T.H., the Marvel role Hampshire is here IRL to talk about today, allows her to combine onscreen strengths she showcased in her two best-known TV roles to date: the comedic timing of David Rose’s bud Stevie on Schitt’s Creek (2015- 2020); and the manic energy emanated by mathematician Jennifer on time-travel series 12 Monkeys (2015-2018)
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A Tony Stark-created code whose humanoid manifestation is styled like an 1920s aviatrix and has the moxie to match, E.D.I.T.H. is one of several AIs living – if that’s the right word – within the programming of the super-robot Vision (Paul Bettany) from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, rebuilt and rebooted after the events of WandaVision and Agatha All Along.
She’s in charge of recreation and fun as part of the downstairs staff at a Downton Abbey-esque English country house that Vision manifests and retreats to in his mind when on airplane mode.
“The whole mood board, vision board was Amelia Earhart,” says a bubbly Hampshire, looking more 2020s than 1920s in a shoulder-length pink haircut.
VisionQuest is the largest production of Hampshire’s career. “I didn’t really think of the MCU of it all until I went to Pinewood Studios,” she says, still marvelling at the working elevators in the full-scale house built inside that legendary studio in England.
Off set, Hampshire’s acting career, which started when she was a child in Montreal in the 1990s on shows such as Are You Afraid of the Dark?, has had its ups and downs, too.
When 12 Monkeys and Schitt’s Creek wrapped one after the other, Hampshire recalls thinking: “It’s all downhill from here.”
After all, Schitt’s Creek, she reminds me, only truly became a pop culture phenomenon on Netflix during the pandemic, leading up to its Emmy Awards sweep in the fall of 2020.
Dan Levy, Annie Murphy, Hampshire, Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy, from Schitt's Creek, arrive at the Canadian Screen Awards in Toronto on March 11, 2018.MARK BLINCH/Reuters
In the immediate aftermath of shooting the finale in 2019, however, she remembers joking with co-star Annie Murphy about waiting for the offers to start rolling in.
Like any artistic intelligence seeking agency and not wanting to be thrown out in between uses, Hampshire started writing work for herself.
Primarily, she spent five years trying to get a remake of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the 1970s satirical soap opera, off the ground.
Announced back in 2021, Hampshire was set to co-write, executive produce and star in the project, produced once again by Norman Lear, while Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney, a long-time friend and collaborator, was to be showrunner.
But that show was sold to TBS, then TBS merged with Discovery in 2022, then the Writers Guild of America strike happened in 2023, and then Lear died.
While individual projects come and go and sometimes undergo protracted deaths, what lasts in the film and television industry are the relationships built.
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Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman may not have made it to the air – but Matt Jordan Smith, who had read Hampshire’s scripts while working at TBS, was later hired to be head of development at Elliot Page’s PageBoy Productions.
That is how Hampshire was brought on to write a remake of Don McKellar and Bruce McDonald’s cult 1990s Canadian TV comedy Twitch City for Page to star in the role originally played by McKellar.
“The thing that I was so sad about that I’d worked on for so long, that didn’t get made, got me a better thing,” she says, of the project she says is currently awaiting a green light from the CBC.
That PageBoy Productions connection also led to her appearing in Slo Pitch (which Page’s company co-produces), while a role in Heated Rivalry was a just a matter of time given how often Hampshire and Tierney have collaborated since they first met and became close friends on the set of Jerry Ciccoritti’s 1999 film The Life Before This.
As for VisionQuest, its creator and showrunner is Terry Matalas – previously best known for 12 Monkeys; he wrote the character of E.D.I.T.H. specifically with Hampshire in mind.
“I just felt like I was getting to work with my best friend again, who writes the most amazing stuff for me,” she says.
In an industry everyone says is now cast by algorithms, it’s old-fashioned human connection that keeps Hampshire’s career humming.
“That to me feels like the greatest achievement of my career: That people want to work with me again and write things for me. I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.”