| “ | No one's gonna care once I've eliminated Wanda Maximoff. They'll believe that the Vision who emerges from the Westview rubble is the same one she illegally tried to bring back to life. They'll thank me for recovering such a valuable asset. | „ |
| ~ Tyler Hayward explaining his plans to Jimmy Woo. |
Tyler Hayward is the secondary antagonist of the 2021 Disney+ Marvel Cinematic Universe miniseries WandaVision. He is the director of the Sentient Weapons Observation and Response Division (S.W.O.R.D.). He will do whatever it takes to free the town of Westview from Scarlet Witch's fantasy reality and use her power to revive Vision to create a sentient weapon.
Hayward is willing to take violent means to accomplish his goals regardless of how much Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo, and Darcy Lewis try to convince him to negotiate with Wanda peacefully.
He was portrayed by Josh Stamberg, who also played Alex Barnes in Justified and Charles Gallagher in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
Biography[]
S.W.O.R.D.[]
Hayward was an agent of S.W.O.R.D. under Director Maria Rambeau for years. He worked with Monica for most of this time, but became acting director of S.W.O.R.D. after every other candidate for the job was killed in Thanos' snap. When Hayward became director, he shifted the organization's extraterrestrial priorities in favor for technological demands instead.
Return of Monica Rambeau[]
When Hulk snapped and revived everyone that was killed in the original snap, Monica Rambeau was alive again. For a month after the second snap, Hayward was investigating a missing persons case in a town called Westview. When Rambeau came back, Hayward told her that her mother, Maria, grounded her on Earth, saying that she could complete terrestrial missions only. Hayward assigned her to go to Westview and send a drone into the anomaly, investigating the case further.
Investigation of the Westview Anomaly[]
When Rambeau went to investigate the forcefield in Westview, she was sucked into the anomaly. Because of this, Hayward set up a S.W.O.R.D. basecamp outside of Westview and began a full-fledged process to figure out what was happening in the town. Hayward and S.W.O.R.D. teamed up with the FBI to uncover this mystery.
After Captain Rambeau was cast out of the anomaly, she said that Wanda Maximoff was the one controlling the Westview anomaly and creating this bizarre sitcom reality. Hayward asked Monica what it felt like to be under Wanda's mind control. Monica described the experience as incredibly painful, like drowning.
Hayward called all agents to a debrief of the situation. He explained that Wanda was controlling Westview, the Vision, and all of the residents inside the town. After Jimmy Woo gave a background explanation of Wanda, Hayward interpreted the events as Wanda being a terrorist, explaining her involvement in HYDRA and her affiliation with Ultron overshadowed her heroic actions and alliance to the Avengers. Hayward then showed footage of Wanda breaking into a S.W.O.R.D. facility and stealing Vision's corpse, which was being operated on by S.W.O.R.D. scientists.
Monica then came up with the idea to send a 1980s-style drone into the anomaly, so it wouldn't be changed because it fit the time period of the sitcom. Hayward secretly wired it with a lethal missile that would kill Maximoff if she would tried to inflict harm on the citizens. Rambeau then tried to talk to Wanda through the drone, though Wanda would view the missile as a threat, resulting in Hayward firing it.
Confrontation with Wanda Maximoff[]
After he fired the drone, a furious Wanda stormed out of the Hex and warned the S.W.O.R.D. agents not to disturb her. Although Hayward tried to argue that she had taken an entire town hostage, she threw the drone back at him and replied that he was threatening her and Westview by aiming weapons at her. When Rambeau stepped in and tried to negotiate, Wanda only felt further aggravated. Maximoff then used her mind powers to brainwash the S.W.O.R.D. agents to point their guns at Hayward, intimidating him. Upon entering back into Westview, the agents dropped their weapons, free from mind control.
Ejecting Monica, Jimmy and Darcy from S.W.O.R.D.[]
After the confrontation, Monica expressed her fury to Hayward, claiming that his cowardice and threats escalated the problem rather than relieve it. He countered by telling her that she didn't live through the trauma of the past five years after the universe had been decimated. Frustrated from their differences, Hayward demanded his personnel to expel Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy from the S.W.O.R.D. basecamp.
Unbeknownst to him, the trio escaped from his agents and reentered into a technology base where Darcy began to hack into some secret files that Hayward had been hiding. She discovered he was privately tracking Vision and all the citizens around him, followed by a secret plan to reactivate Vision called "Cataract" that he was hiding and that remained under wraps.
When Vision began to cross through the energy field of the Hex, Hayward stood by, watching with awe. Despite Darcy's cries to help Vision, Hayward handcuffed her to a car as Vision began to disintegrate. The Hex then began to expand, enveloping Vision in, all of the S.W.O.R.D. agents, and Darcy. Hayward hopped into a car and sped away while calling for a response to all of his agents, to no avail, leaving him without a base and any of his staff left.
Revealing the White Vision[]
With Monica, Jimmy and Darcy out of the way, Hayward reveals his true intentions, as Vision's original body was reassembled and reprogrammed, giving him a white color. To power the White Vision, Hayward used the drone Wanda had countered (and which still had leftover energy from the Hex).
Final Battle and Defeat[]
Discovering Jimmy still spying on him, Hayward has him arrested, and arrogantly explained to Jimmy his plans to get rid of both Wanda and her Vision copy. When Agatha Harkness challenges Wanda into opening the Hex to free the townspeople, Hayward takes the opportunity to unleash White Vision and S.W.O.R.D troops on Wanda. As the Visions and the witches battle each other, he attempts to kill Wanda's two children, Billy and Tommy, though Monica intervenes by taking the bullets for them. Hayward fails to kill the twins and Monica due to their superpowers. As Hayward runs out of bullets, he tries to flee, only to be thwarted by Darcy crashing a funnel-cake truck into his car. With White Vision having been reset by Hex Vision, Jimmy had freed himself and called his co-workers at the FBI, who in turn came to arrest Hayward after Wanda finally did away with the Hex, as he was taken away, he lost his job and was sent to prison for his heinous crimes.
Personality[]
Although Hayward is presented as a calm man who can keep situations in check, underneath his demeanor reveals a more hasty, ruthless and extreme individual jagged from the impact of the Snap. He oversimplifies the Maximoff twins' past, labeling them as "radicalized" for joining HYDRA and for their alliance with Ultron, while dismissing that they joined the Avengers later, and also judging Wanda as a terrorist based on the destruction at Lagos, despite it being an accident. Darcy and Jimmy are unsettled by this, to the point of insulting him.
Despite sharing similar intentions with Monica Rambeau to free the people in Westview from Wanda's control, he attempts more desperate approaches to do so, exhibited by the missile he launched disguised inside the drone without Monica's knowledge. Although he claims to care for the citizens' safety, his judgement over Wanda's behavior results in him neglecting that she was accompanied by her children. As Wanda noted, he tried to use more force in his negotiations by his agents targeting her with weapons, compared with Monica's methods of reasoning without them. Upon being confronted by Monica over his violent methods, he is shown to be clouded by anger and is insensitive about her feelings, dismissing her as wanting them to reason with Wanda as softness, an effect of not having to endure the trauma after Thanos' Snap and not witnessing Maria's death.
He is shown to be impatient, rude and stubborn when contradicted, as after being distressed because of Monica's complaints, he ordered his agents to take her out of the base along with Jimmy and Darcy, since they also support her. Upon seeing Vision break through the barrier, Hayward merely did nothing and watched. When the energy field around Westview began to expand, he fled and allowed several of his agents to be consumed by it.
He also is a liar and manipulator, as he claimed that Wanda stole the Vision's body from S.W.O.R.D. headquarters while he doctored video footage to make it appear that way. In actuality, Wanda left S.W.O.R.D. peacefully after mournfully confirming Vision was truly dead, all to paint Wanda as a terrorist and a threat in order to kill her. As he does not want anyone to know that S.W.O.R.D. has been working on Vision's remains the whole time, he tries to keep this lie after having constructed the White Vision. He sents White Vision to kill Wanda and the Vision inside the Hex, hoping to incriminate Wanda as the resposible for White Vision after the other Vision is eliminated.
When he, along with other S.W.O.R.D. agents, manage to invade the Hex, Hayward shows no hesitation in shooting at Vision and Wanda's children, when the twins are facing the agents. As Monica puts herself between him and the twins, he continues to try to shoot, and only fails to kill any of them because of Billy's and Monica's superpowers, that are able to stop the bullets.
Trivia[]
- Hayward's obsession with killing Scarlet Witch has led some fans to speculate whether Hayward if he was really a good guy and if he genuinely wanted to free the citizens from Westview, or if he had secret motives to get rid of Wanda Maximoff. Some speculated that he would be a Skrull in disguise, a disguised Mephisto or even a revived Ultron.
- While these theories were proven to be false, Hayward in fact had secret motives as he wanted to create a sentient weapon by reviving the original body of Vision that was in the possession of S.W.O.R.D. the whole time.
