With filming set to get underway this coming week it seems things are finally heating up on the Batman vs. Superman front. A couple of days ago Zack Snyder gave us our first look at Ben Affleck’s Batman suited up next to the Batmobile, and now Jesse Eisenberg has spoken about his role as DC’s iconic villain Lex Luthor in the 2016 Man of Steel sequel…
“I don’t know the history as well as the people making the movie, so I guess it’s up to them to figure out how much they want to separate it from previous incarnations,” Eisenberg tells IGN. “But I will treat it like it’s its own role. There’s no way to play the history of the character played by other people, unless you do some kind of wink, but that doesn’t seem like a responsible way to act. So I will just do it as though it’s a character, in the same way you do a movie like The Double, which is a smaller movie — but you just kind of treat it like a character, and that’s probably the best course of action, I think.”
Asked about whether the opportunity to take centre stage as (presumably) the main villain in Warner’s DC universe was part of the appeal, Eisenberg responded by stating that, “The character’s really good, so it’s like doing anything else. They make a lot of those movies, so if you’re an actor in things, you will probably cross paths with it at some point. But the character’s written really well. It’s a really great role. The fact that it’s in a big movie, you know, it seems like a character that would be in any kind of movie. It just happens to be in a bigger, flashier kind of thing.”
Batman vs. Superman is set for release on May 6th 2016 with Zack Snyder directing a cast that includes returning Man of Steel stars Henry Cavill (Superman), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Diane Lane (Martha Kent) and Laurence Fishburne (Perry White) alongside Ben Affleck (Argo) as Batman, Gal Gadot (Fast & Furious 6) as Wonder Woman, Ray Fisher as Cyborg, Jesse Eisenberg (Now You See Me) as Lex Luthor, Jeremy Irons (The Borgias) as Alfred Pennyworth and Holly Hunter (The Piano), Callan Mulvey (300: Rise of an Empire), and Tao Okamoto (The Wolverine) in as-yet-unrevealed roles.
Originally published May 15, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
