Jesse Eisenberg Answers Actual Questions about His Lex Luthor

Warner Bros. is keeping much of its Man of Steel sequel under wraps, barring the release of a picture or two. But actors gotta act, and then they gotta do press junkets, so Jesse Eisenberg, hired on to play the mastermind Lex Luthor, is being peppered with questions to answer as best he can.

First up, the most important question known to mankind: will Eisenberg go bald for the role?

Quoth the actor: “I’m not allowed to say anything, because of their privacy.”

Ok, so that’s definitely not actually the most important question facing humanity today, but if I had to put money on something, I’d guess that they’re going to let him keep the hair (at least at first, anyway). What else did Eisenberg have to say? Pretty basic actor with a new movie stuff.

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.

…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.

Personally, I have a feeling that the decision to go with a younger Luthor than the comics was made out of a desire to emphasize the differences between him and Bruce Wayne for the audience. Luthor’s problems with Superman have always stemmed from his perception of himself as a made man, where Superman has power and admiration simply handed to him by a gullible and easily impressed public. It’s easy to twist his character’s emphasis on earning your accomplishments to a dislike for Bruce Wayne and his old money, inherited fortune, and public persona of tabloid idiocy.

Of course, that’s what I would do with a Batman/Superman/Younger Lex Luthor story. We’ll see what Zack Snyder winds up doing.

(IGN via GeekTyrant.)

Previously in Man Of Steel 2

• Sad Batman, the Meme
• Batman and Batmobile Revealed
• Cyborg to Join Man of Steel 2

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