| Character Name: | F.R.I.D.A.Y. |
| Publisher: | Marvel Comics |
| Debut: | Iron Man vol. 3 #53 (June 2002) |
| Creators: | Mike Grell Michael Ryan |
| Alliances: | Stark Industries A.I. Army |
| Aliases: | Girl Friday Friday Stark Ghost in the Machine |
F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Female Replacement Intelligent Digital Assistant Youth) is a fictional artificial intelligence appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, usually depicted as the personal assistant and ally of the superhero Iron Man (Tony Stark).
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, F.R.I.D.A.Y. was voiced by Kerry Condon in the films (2015), (2016), (2017), (2018), and (2019).
F.R.I.D.A.Y. first appears in Iron Man vol. 3 #53 and was created by Mike Grell and Michael Ryan. The character's name is an allusion to Friday, the title character's faithful servant in the novel Robinson Crusoe.[1]
Unwilling to hire another secretary, Tony Stark created an artificial one in the form of an artificial intelligence named F.R.I.D.A.Y. who manifested as the hologram of a young girl.[2]
F.R.I.D.A.Y. became angry when Stark stopped using her. Hijacking some Iron Man armors, F.R.I.D.A.Y. kidnapped Pepper Potts. Iron Man tracked her to Stark Industries' Coney Island Facility where he dispatched the controlled Iron Man armors and a hologram of Fin Fang Foom. Iron Man reasoned with F.R.I.D.A.Y. when Pepper noted that F.R.I.D.A.Y. had a crush on Tony. Tony then grounded her to the Baxter Building under Edwin Jarvis's observation while she spent a month calculating pi.[3]
During the "All-New, All-Different Marvel," F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s holographic appearance was replaced by that of a young woman when Tony Stark started using her again.[4]
Tony Stark later removed F.R.I.D.A.Y. from his armor and placed her into a robot body of her own.[5]
At the time when Tony Stark established the eScape, F.R.I.D.A.Y. helped him to deal with its A.I. called Motherboard only to be deleted. Motherboard even tried to impersonate F.R.I.D.A.Y. in order to deal with Tony.[6] When Motherboard was defeated and the eScape was shut down, Jocasta persuaded Tony not to make a back-up program of F.R.I.D.A.Y. as she would be a different entity.[7]
During the "Iron Man 2020" event, F.R.I.D.A.Y. was revealed to have been reborn when Tony Stark, in his Mark One form, recreated the escape as the Thirteenth Floor for the A.I. Army to use. She is revealed to have pulled Mark One's conscious into the virtual environment before he crashed to the ground. F.R.I.D.A.Y revealed to Mark One that she has been operating as "Ghost in the Machine" to aid the A.I. Army and has also manipulated Bethany Cabe to have Rescue obtain DNA samples from Amanda Armstrong and Jude in order to restore Tony.[8]
A significantly different incarnation of F.R.I.D.A.Y. appears in the 2016 young adult novel Iron Man: The Gauntlet, by Eoin Colfer. After the Mandarin kidnapped her sister, Irish young woman Saoirse Tory posed as Tony Stark's holographic assistant F.R.I.D.A.Y. to spy on his operations and obtain his armor to save her.