As promotion on Batman vs. Superman is expected to continue for the next two years, with principal photography beginning any day now and the film not hitting theaters until May 6, 2016, we get another little morsel of information. Jesse Eisenberg, who will play Lex Luthor in the Zack Snyder-directed feature, discussed his part in the film with IGN, particularly his lack of knowledge of the character from the comics and how you shouldn’t expect him to play an homage to previous TV or theatrical incarnations:
It’ll definitely be played by a different person, but I don’t know really how different this — 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. 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.
I know some people might hate that answer, but I personally love it. It would be great if Eisenberg knew absolutely nothing about the character outside of what he is told by the screenwriters and Snyder so as to create a completely new vision. As for why he took the role…
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.
As for whether or not Eisenberg is going bald for the role, he wasn’t saying.
