Ray Fisher and Joe Manganiello Talk Joss Whedon, Justice League Reshoots
It's been a long road to get to the Snyder cut.
After four long years, Zack Snyder’s fabled “Snyder Cut” of Justice League is coming to HBO Max on March 18. The four hour film comes after Snyder stepped away from the original film due to a family tragedy, and Warner Bros. hired Joss Whedon to finish up the film. The resulting effort was both critically and commercially panned, a bomb so bad it effectively derailed the DCEU.
Joe Manganiello, who was introduced in an end credits scene as villainous mercenary Deathstroke, saw his character’s future disappear when Ben Affleck canceled his planned solo Batman film. Manganiello had trained for months for the film, which was supposed to feature Deathstroke as the antagonist. Ray Fisher found himself in a highly publicized battle with Warner Bros. and DC producers when he called out Whedon’s allegedly racist and toxic behavior on set. Warner Bros. launched an internal investigation, which was kept under wraps. In response, Ray Fisher’s role in the upcoming The Flash film was canceled.
Both actors were rehired by Zack Snyder for the Snyder Cut reshoots, and they talked to Vanity Fair about their experience with the Warner/DC machine. Manganiello described the long road to playing Deathstroke, saying:
“I didn’t just shoot the final scene for Justice League, the end-credit sequence. I was preparing for a movie. I was preparing for [Affleck’s] Batman. So, all the work, the sword training, the guns, you start thinking, Okay, well, I have to hurry up and shoot this scene to tease that movie. But then next year I’m going to come back and fully flesh this character out. I had all of these thoughts. And this is the culmination of four years of staring at the ceiling at night. What could I do? So, it’s fun to come back and start playing a little bit of that out. And of course, it’s great to see Zack and all the people I haven’t seen since London, all those years ago.”
But while the Deathstroke scene was re-cut, Fisher suffered the brunt of Whedon’s reshoots and character changes. “There was a lot of stuff that changed, to be completely honest with you,” Fisher sad. “I had to go back and reshoot every single scene I was in. None of this stuff that you see in the theatrical cut with me, except for the Gotham City police rooftop scene with J.K. Simmons, [is original]. Everything else I had to reshoot.”
Fisher described his struggle on the reshoots, and the power dynamics with Whedon. While Warner Bros. and Whedon promised an open and collaborative atmosphere, Fisher soon found that was not at all the case. “Going from a person like Zack to a person like Joss was like day and night,” he said. “What ended up happening, I think, was a bit of a collaborative gaslighting that we got from Joss.”
Fisher also described Whedon as an egotistical narcissist still reeling from criticism of Avengers: Age of Ultron:
“You could tell very quickly that [Whedon] was very upset that people did not like Age of Ultron very much. This is what I gathered from the first conversation that I had with him. There was a bit of this sort of egotistical narcissism that ended up going into everything that he was trying to do.
You can see it in some of the scenes that were produced. Flash falling on Wonder Woman’s [chest] is something that he yanked out of Age of Ultron and just copy-pasted here. In my first conversation creatively with him, he kept accidentally calling “Diana” “Natasha,” which is crazy stuff. [Note: For the unfamiliar, the real name of Marvel’s Black Widow is Natasha, and DC’s Wonder Woman is Diana.] This was in the conversation that they made me have with him prior to giving me the script. There was a lot of belittling on set. There was a lot of mocking, both of previous work and of actors and people.”
Fisher added that when he had notes or thoughts, Whedon responded, “Listen, I don’t like to take notes from anybody, not even Robert Downey Jr.”
Ultimately, Fisher is excited that Snyder’s Justice League is finally having its day. Fisher said, “It feels kind of like kismet. It feels right. It does feel like justice in a way. Took four years to get us here. But listen, we’re here.”
(via Vanity Fair, featured image: Warner Bros.)
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