Quicksilver is Pietro Maximoff, the super-fast twin brother of Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced him in X-Men #4 in March 1964 as a member of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and by 1965 he was an Avenger. He has bounced between the Avengers, X-Factor, and the Inhumans ever since, usually with a chip on his shoulder about how slow everyone around him is.
Quicksilver sits right on the line between the X-Men franchise and the Avengers side of Marvel, and the movies split him down the middle. Evan Peters played him in the Fox X-Men films, Aaron Taylor-Johnson played a completely separate version in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the two versions hit theaters within a year of each other.
Quicksilver's Powers and Abilities
Quicksilver's main power is superhuman speed. He can cross a city in seconds, and his reflexes and perception keep up with his legs, so he isn't running blind. His accelerated metabolism also lets him heal faster than a normal person.
The speed shapes his personality too. Writers have long played up how painfully slow the world feels to Pietro, which is a big part of why he comes across as impatient and arrogant. Peter David built an entire issue of X-Factor around that idea, with Pietro sitting through government-mandated counseling with Doc Samson.
Where the speed comes from depends on which decade of comics is being read. For most of his history, Quicksilver was a mutant. Since 2015, his powers have been explained as the result of the High Evolutionary's genetic experiments, which technically means he isn't a mutant at all.
Quicksilver in the Comics: From the Brotherhood to the Avengers
Pietro and Wanda started out as reluctant members of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Their loyalty came from a debt rather than a shared belief, since Magneto had saved Wanda from an angry mob, and both twins walked away from the Brotherhood once Magneto was out of the picture.
Quicksilver and Cap's Kooky Quartet
Avengers #16 in May 1965 swapped out nearly the entire founding lineup. Captain America stayed and led a new team of Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver, a lineup better known as Cap's Kooky Quartet. Pietro and Hawkeye clashed constantly, and the MCU later turned that rivalry into a running bit in Age of Ultron.
Quicksilver, Crystal, and the Inhumans
Pietro married Crystal of the Inhumans' Royal Family, and their daughter, Luna Maximoff, first appeared as a baby in Fantastic Four #240 in 1982. The marriage was rocky for most of its run, with Pietro's temper on one side and Crystal's affair with Norm Webster, a real estate agent, on the other. A later love triangle between Crystal, the Black Knight, and Sersi added even more strain, and the two are no longer married.
Quicksilver in X-Factor
In 1991, Pietro joined the government-sponsored version of X-Factor run by Val Cooper, starting with X-Factor #71. He came back to the book in 2014's All-New X-Factor, where Polaris led a corporate team for Serval Industries and Pietro quietly reported back to the Avengers. That run also gave him a chance to patch things up with Luna.
Quicksilver in House of M and Son of M
House of M is the big one for Quicksilver. In 2005, after Wanda's breakdown in Avengers Disassembled had the Avengers and X-Men debating whether she needed to be killed, Pietro convinced his sister to rewrite reality instead. The result was a world where mutants ruled and Magneto sat on the throne.
It ended with Wanda saying "No more mutants," which stripped the powers from about 90 percent of the world's mutants on what became known as M-Day. Pietro lost his speed along with them. The 2006 miniseries Son of M followed a powerless Pietro stealing the Inhumans' Terrigen Crystals to get his powers back, and the government's seizure of those crystals afterward helped set off the Silent War between the United States and the Inhumans.
Is Magneto Quicksilver's Father?
It depends on the year. When Pietro and Wanda debuted, their parents weren't revealed, and 1970s stories pointed toward the Golden Age heroes the Whizzer and Miss America. Marvel then made Magneto their father, officially confirming it in 1983's The Vision and the Scarlet Witch #4, and that version held for more than 30 years.
In 2014, the AXIS event had Wanda cast a spell meant to curse her family bloodline, and it did nothing to Magneto, revealing he wasn't their biological father. Uncanny Avengers #4 in 2015 explained that the High Evolutionary had experimented on the twins as babies, which meant Pietro and Wanda were never mutants, and that issue named Django and Marya Maximoff as their parents. Scarlet Witch #4 in 2016 revised it again, naming Natalya Maximoff as the twins' biological mother, with Django and Marya as the Romani couple who raised them.
Fans have never been happy with the change, and Marvel knows it. The 2024 miniseries Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver from Steve Orlando and Lorenzo Tammetta played with the question of Magneto's parentage, but as of early 2026, Marvel had not reversed the retcon. On screen, the Fox X-Men films kept Magneto as the father, while the MCU never touched it.
Quicksilver's Family and Relationships
Scarlet Witch: Wanda Maximoff is Pietro's twin sister and the center of nearly every major Quicksilver story. He is protective of her to the point of making terrible decisions, and House of M is the obvious example.
Magneto: Pietro spent decades believing Magneto was his father and resenting him for it. Son of M leaned hard into Pietro's anger at a father who never really acknowledged him.
Polaris: Lorna Dane debuted in X-Men #49 in October 1968 and was long suspected to be Magneto's daughter, a question muddied by a Magneto android's claim and other twists until Uncanny X-Men #431 confirmed it in November 2003. That made her Pietro's half-sister until the 2015 retcon removed the blood connection, though the two still worked together in All-New X-Factor.
Crystal: Pietro's ex-wife, an elemental-controlling member of the Inhumans' Royal Family.
Luna Maximoff: Pietro and Crystal's daughter. She was born without powers, gained them through Terrigen exposure in Son of M, and later reconciled with her father during All-New X-Factor.
Wiccan and Speed: Wanda's twin sons, reborn as Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, are Pietro's nephews. Tommy, better known as Speed, has super speed just like his uncle.
Django and Marya Maximoff: The Romani couple who raised the twins. Uncanny Avengers #4 in 2015 named them as the twins' parents, and Scarlet Witch #4 in 2016 then named Natalya Maximoff as the biological mother.
Hawkeye: Pietro's teammate and rival going back to the Kooky Quartet days. In the MCU, Pietro died saving him.
Why Are There Two Quicksilvers? Evan Peters vs Aaron Taylor-Johnson
<p>Back in 2014, 20th Century Fox held the film rights to Marvel's mutants, while Marvel Studios held the Avengers. Quicksilver was a mutant and an Avenger, so both studios used him. The catch for Marvel Studios was that its version couldn't be called a mutant or connected to Magneto.
Marvel Studios moved first, introducing Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Pietro Maximoff in the mid-credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier on April 4, 2014, before giving him a full role in Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. Fox followed about seven weeks later with Evan Peters as Peter Maximoff in X-Men: Days of Future Past on May 23, 2014. The two actors had already shared the screen in Kick-Ass, and Taylor-Johnson has spoken warmly about running into Peters at Comic-Con and admiring what Peters did with the character.
Evan Peters as Quicksilver in the X-Men Movies
Quicksilver's Pentagon Kitchen Scene in Days of Future Past
Peter Maximoff in X-Men: Days of Future Past is a 1970s teenager living in his mom's basement, recruited by Wolverine, Charles Xavier, and Hank McCoy to break Magneto out of a cell under the Pentagon. The standout moment is the kitchen scene, where Peter moves through a room full of guards in slow motion to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle," redirecting bullets and messing with everyone before the room catches up. Peter also drops a line about his mom once knowing a man who could control metal, the first hint that Magneto is his father.
Quicksilver in X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix
X-Men: Apocalypse gave Peter a bigger version of the same trick, rescuing the students from the exploding Xavier mansion to Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)." This time Peter knows Magneto is his father and goes to Xavier partly to find him, though he admits to Mystique that he isn't ready to tell Erik. Dark Phoenix sidelined him early, with Jean Grey badly injuring him during the confrontation at her childhood home. Peters also turned up in an uncredited cameo in Deadpool 2.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron
The MCU's Pietro Maximoff is a Sokovian who, along with Wanda, volunteered for HYDRA experiments under Baron Strucker using Loki's scepter, the weapon housing the Mind Stone. The twins blamed Tony Stark for their parents' deaths after spending days trapped as kids beside an unexploded Stark Industries shell, so they start Age of Ultron working with Ultron against the Avengers. Once Wanda sees that Ultron's real plan is wiping out humanity, the twins switch sides.
How Did Quicksilver Die in Age of Ultron?
Pietro dies during the final battle in Sokovia. Ultron opens fire from a Quinjet on Hawkeye, who is carrying a child to safety, and Pietro runs into the path of the bullets to shield them both. His last line is a callback to his running jab at Clint, "You didn't see that coming?" Wanda feels his death from across the city, and it pushes her to abandon her post and tear apart Ultron's main body.
Pietro never came back in the main MCU timeline. Clint named his newborn son Nathaniel Pietro Barton at the end of the film, and Taylor-Johnson joked in a 2024 IMDb interview that he still doesn't know why Wanda never resurrected him.
Evan Peters' Quicksilver in WandaVision: Who Is Ralph Bohner?
WandaVision pulled off a twist in 2021 by bringing Evan Peters into the MCU as Wanda's brother. "Pietro" shows up at her door at the end of episode five, looking and acting nothing like the Pietro who died in Sokovia, and Darcy, watching from outside Westview, points out that Wanda apparently recast him.
The finale revealed he wasn't Quicksilver at all. He was Ralph Bohner, the never-seen husband Agnes kept mentioning, a Westview resident Agatha Harkness had been controlling with an enchanted necklace. Peters has said he knew from the beginning that he was playing Ralph under Agatha's control.
Is Quicksilver in Avengers: Doomsday?
Marvel has not announced Quicksilver for Avengers: Doomsday, which hits theaters December 18, 2026. The film brings back original X-Men trilogy actors Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Alan Cumming, and Kelsey Grammer, along with Channing Tatum's Gambit from Deadpool and Wolverine, which is why the question keeps coming up, especially with McKellen's Magneto on board.
The problem is that Peters' Quicksilver came from the Fox prequel films, not the original trilogy Doomsday is drawing from. Peters said in a January 2026 interview that he would be interested in returning in a more grounded take, and Taylor-Johnson's Pietro is dead in the main MCU timeline, though a multiverse movie leaves room for either one. Elizabeth Olsen's return as the Scarlet Witch hasn't been confirmed either, so for now both twins are on the sidelines.
Quicksilver in Video Games: Marvel Snap, Lego Marvel, and Marvel Rivals
Quicksilver is playable in TT Games' Lego Marvel's Avengers, which puts the MCU version of Pietro into the Age of Ultron levels alongside the Scarlet Witch, Vision, and Ultron.
In Marvel Snap, Quicksilver is a one-cost, two-power card that always starts in the opening hand, which makes him a starter staple for decks that want a guaranteed turn one play. Fantasy Flight Games also gave him his own Hero Pack for Marvel Champions: The Card Game.
Marvel Rivals has not added Quicksilver to its roster. NetEase's hero shooter references him in the Scarlet Witch's lore, where his fate after the Timestream Entanglement is left unknown. With Magneto and the Scarlet Witch both already playable, Pietro is the obvious missing piece of that family for a future Duelist.
Quicksilver in X-Men: Evolution
X-Men: Evolution reimagined Pietro as a cocky Bayville High student and a member of the Brotherhood, voiced by Richard Ian Cox. The show kept him as Magneto's son, and Wanda later joined the Brotherhood alongside him, which turned the team into another Maximoff family argument.
