In Orange Sky, I had one of Wheatley's special interests be spy films, and specifically James Bond. I did this on purpose for a few reasons and I had some individuals curious about the fact, so I thought I'd explain here :)
A thing I love to do with a lot of characters to flesh them out is relate them back to the actors who play the characters (if any of you have seen my DC work then you'll have seen this tactic with 66 Riddler), and I feel there's so much you can do with Wheatley being linked to Stephen Merchant (and way too much that I know about this guy) for me to not make some connections. After all, Steve was selected to play Wheatley because people at Valve had seen him in the BBC TV show "Extras" (which he co-wrote) and gone from there, so there's already connections prior me doing anything.
Case in point: Steve is a big fan of James Bond films! He's mentioned it in multiple interviews in the past, and even joked about the notion of how he should play Q in future Bond films lol. I could've stopped here but I put a LOT (probably too much) thought into my headcanons so instead of just giving Wheatley this interest just because I thought about if and how it would work, and what it does for his character.
Ignoring my adaptation of Orange Sky for the time being, I want to focus on the original games to talk about Wheatley's character. Anxious (the rambling), ambitious (trying for big jobs), hasn't amounted to much (people talking down to him), wants to be something more (the glee behind his voice when getting validation from the chassis - "Tiny little Wheatley did this!"). Insecurity, etc... Anyway, he's one of the more developed cores, and despite being called a moron so often, he's got a good understanding of things around him and is "alive" enough to feel emotion. It's a lot of years to be going around Aperture doing absolutely nothing on the management rail and I don't think it's out of the question that televisions exist within the building for the scientists, Cave, etc. The reception may be spotty but things still may get through, including Bond films, and, bored, he'd give it a watch-through.
Now why would Wheatley like them? Short answer: they make him feel good. Wheatley loves the excitement of adventure because it gives him a good adrenaline in direct opposition to how he feels panicking during any scene with GLaDOS, for example. He loves adventurers, too, anyone that does anything remarkable is someone he idolises - notice how he yaps on about the human who took GLaDOS down and is rather neutral to Chell at the start but after finding out she was his unknown hero the whole time, suddenly needs to be around her always and practically worships the ground she walks on between comments slipping through from his old view of humans. Watching Bond films makes him think "hey, I could do that, I want to be like that human that took Her down, I could be Bond". And he stays there and watches the films, probably claiming he would've done it better or not fallen into a trap, just because it's like living that experience in a way he never will and for a while he can suspend his disbelief and pretend he's something that people see worth in. For the hours Bond is on TV, in the imaginary world in his head, he matters.
Onto Orange Sky, it's generally the same thing (albeit here he sees the films post-escape on the bad connection of TVs, films if he can get his hands on them, but I wrote it in so he initially developed the interest via reading the original books). He admires bravery, the courage he does have but doesn't realise he's got and has projected entirely onto Chell. He and Chell are the protagonists of a Bond story in his head and suddenly everything that happened with Aperture was just a spy mission he'd been on, and thinking back to it he can pretend it was just him living Bond's life and there wasn't any real danger, almost like a coping mechanism. Projecting himself into Bond makes him feel good, and there he gets really involved with his fantasies and even more interested in those.
There's probably other points I forgot to mention here but this is the general idea behind that. Hopefully it makes a little more sense now rather than if I put it in there just because lol
Thanks for reading and honestly a big pat on the back to anyone who notices any of the other Stephen Merchant references I crammed into the fic LOL
