Ruaridh Mollica, the Sebastian star who plays Vision’s son in VisionQuest

Ruaridh Mollica

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 14, 1999 Prato, Tuscany, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Tell It to the Bees, Sunshine on Leith, Sebastian

Ruaridh Mollica was meant to be defending computer networks by now. He had a computer science degree from Heriot-Watt University and a place on a cybersecurity master’s course in London when a BBC Three horror series offered him a part, and he gave up the place to take the job. Marvel has now picked him to play Tommy Maximoff, the speedster son of Vision and Wanda Maximoff, in VisionQuest, the Disney+ series that closes the run begun by WandaVision. What his career has to settle next is whether an actor who made his name in small, exposed independent films can walk into the biggest franchise in the business and keep what got him noticed.

The Italian half of his story comes first. Mollica was born in Prato, the Tuscan textile city just outside Florence, to a Scottish mother and an Italian father, and he grew up in Edinburgh. He went to Broughton High School there and joined Strange Town, a youth theatre company, through which he met Ruth Hollyman, the agent who would later bring him back to acting.

He started young. Born on 14 October 1999, he turns 27 on the day VisionQuest reaches Disney+. As a boy he had a guest part in the BBC One detective series Case Histories, with Jason Isaacs in the lead, and danced in the background of the Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith. He played the teenage version of Christian Cooke’s character in Stonemouth and had a small role in Tell It to the Bees. Acting stayed a sideline, though. He studied computer science, did snowsports at university and graduated in 2021.

Hollyman pulled him back in during his final year. She put him up for the lead in Sean Lìonadh’s short film Too Rough, opposite Joshua Griffin, as a working-class Glasgow boy trying to hide his boyfriend from his homophobic, hard-drinking family the morning after a party. The short won a Scottish BAFTA. The BBC Three series Red Rose followed, with Mollica as Patrick Hume, the part he turned down the master’s for, and then his first lead on television, as Po in the Channel 5 thriller Witness Number 3. In the same stretch he played a London fringe run of Wasted at the Jack Studio Theatre and wrote and directed a short of his own, The Doomsday Clock.

The film that changed his position was Sebastian, Mikko Mäkelä’s second feature. Mollica plays Max Williamson, a young London writer who starts selling sex under an assumed name to research his debut novel, then finds the research has taken over his life. The part asks for explicit scenes and for a man who lies to everyone around him, including himself. The film opened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024. Mollica has said that making it helped him understand his own queerness. That November he was nominated for the British Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Performance, and Screen International had already named him one of its Rising Stars Scotland.

Television filled the rest of 2024 with supporting work: the young Teddy Bass, Stephen Moyer’s character, in the Paramount+ series Sexy Beast, short runs in The Jetty and Ridley, and Jaz Cox in The Franchise, a comedy set on the set of a superhero film, which now looks like a rehearsal. He then joined Swann Arlaud and Woody Norman in Sukkwan Island, Vladimir de Fontenay’s adaptation of David Vann’s novel about a father who takes his son to live on a remote island. Mollica plays Roy as an adult, looking back at the boy Norman plays. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and reached British cinemas this July under the title My Father’s Island.

On paper the rise looks smooth, but the record is more uneven. Sebastian drew festival attention and strong notices for its lead, yet it took about $65,000 at the North American box office, so far more people have heard of the performance than have seen it. Sukkwan Island got mixed reviews, and his role there is the adult frame around a story carried by Arlaud and Norman. Marvel has also put him inside a story fans already read through somebody else. In Agatha All Along, Billy Maximoff, played by Joe Locke, moved his twin Tommy’s soul into the body of Thomas Shepherd, a teenager who had drowned. A year before VisionQuest reached Disney+, Mollica and Locke shared a West End stage. That leaves him with two jobs: playing Tommy, and getting out from under the pairing fans built for him in advance.

The stage work is where critics have already taken his side. In September 2025 he made his West End debut at the Trafalgar Theatre in Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston, directed by Jack Serio, as Chris, a young man stuck in a small town in Washington State, opposite Locke and Sophie Melville. The posters sold Locke. PinkNews called Mollica the obvious standout. In January 2026 he turned up in the second series of Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows as Nicolas Grafton, in the Victorian London of bare-knuckle boxing and the Forty Elephants gang.

VisionQuest was shot at Pinewood Studios between March and July 2025, with Terry Matalas as showrunner, Paul Bettany back as Vision and James Spader as Ultron. Mollica’s Tommy is an 18-year-old orphan just out of the foster care system in London, picking pockets to survive alongside Lauren Morais as Lisa Molinari, his partner in crime. Mollica has described him as a grifter who is lost in his own life. His reference point was Matt Damon‘s Will Hunting, the maths prodigy mopping floors, an apt choice for a computer science graduate who walked away from a career in code.

Off screen he talks about his private life plainly and briefly. He is queer and, while he identifies as bisexual, prefers the word queer. He has said that he was not fully out in Edinburgh and that moving to London let him come out, at the same time as Sebastian was being made and released.

The first two episodes of VisionQuest screen at the BFI London Film Festival on 12 October 2026 and arrive on Disney+ two days later, with the rest of the eight-episode series running weekly until 11 November. After that he has two films without release dates: Reid Carolin’s Isle of Man for Amazon MGM, with Channing Tatum, Eve Hewson and Ciarán Hinds, and Lorna Tucker’s Bare, with Florence Hunt, Isla Fisher and Colin Firth. Which of those roles he chose after Marvel, and which he took because of Marvel, will show where he wants to go next.

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Tags: actors, Paul Bettany, VisionQuest, Joe Locke, Ruaridh Mollica, SebastiAn, Sukkwan Island

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