Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor will be more than “silly and villainous”

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

I think it's safe to say that casting Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE would not have been the first choice for many of us, but I remain hopeful that Eisenberg will at the very least give us a Lex Luthor which will stand apart from his predecessors. Fan expectations surrounding a role like this are a powerful thing, but Jesse Eisenberg isn't letting any of that bother him:

The expectations that I have are never the same expectations that an audience has, I don’t have expectations for myself to adhere to a comic book character, but a lot of people are interested in how I would coincide with the comic book character. But it couldn’t be farther from my mind, because I’m just playing a role… It’s a really great character that’s written by this guy, Chris Terrio, he’s a phenomenal writer… He loves my character in the same way I love my character. He put a lot of work into it. It’s a great character, there’s an emotional core to the character. It’s not this silly, villainous character. This is a real depiction of a person who thinks these things. So the challenge is to make it seem real.

Gene Hackman owned the role of Lex Luthor for so long that comparisons will always be made with anyone who takes on the role; MTV asked Eisenberg whether he had Hackman's performance on his mind at all in terms of purposefully going a different way or taking any sort of inspiration:

No, that’s an entirely different thing, also the tone of that movie is so different, that movie wouldn’t be made that way now. The way we expect movies to be now, which is for the best probably, we expect there to be some kind of psychological accuracy. That the person is coming from a place that’s probably diagnosable in some ways. This is not [a winking, knowing movie], this is a real depiction of a person who thinks these things.

To sum it all up I suppose we can draw the conclusion that Jesse Eisenberg's take on Lex Luthor will be as dark and as gritty as the rest of the new DC cinematic universe; and here I was thinking that he'd be spending the majority of BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE plotting to steal those forty cakes.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE hits theaters on March 25, 2016.