After guest starring as The Mist on The Flash TV series and recurring as Victor Zsasz on Gotham, Anthony Carrigan is transitioning to the superhero movie space playing Rex Mason, a.k.a. Metamorpho, in James Gunn’s Superman. This will also be the first time the character has been depicted in a live-action setting, although than being a CGI creation, prosthetics and makeup were used to turn Carrigan into Metamorpho for the upcoming DC movie. Frankly though, what he went through for this transformation sounds pretty rough, but what’s even worse is how Carrigan described Metamorpho’s one-sided relationship with Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor.
As the Barry star detailed, it took five to six hours each day to realize Metamorpho’s unique appearance, which Rex Mason obtained when he gained the ability to transmute any part of his body into elemental compounds. He explained what this was like for him as follows:
It’s things that were glued on me, but then they painted on detail, and then more things were glued onto that. I’m not kidding when I say that I was glued in, I was sewn in, I was completely enveloped. I was tied in…roped in, basically. But all in service of this incredible costume.
EW that he’s a “big fan of practical effects” and felt that all those hours were “worth it because you can actually feel the texture of something. Your brain notices the difference.” Because he endured his two older sisters “put whatever makeup they wanted” on him during childhood, Carrigan’s now able to go into a “tranquil state,” though he admitted that the last hour is “the hardest.”
the Justice Gang members. Unfortunately, Rex Mason will be forced by Lex Luthor to turn his body into kryptonite to keep David Corenswet’s Man of Steel weak. As Carrigan put it:
You’re in a situation where it’s having to hurt someone, having to be an agent of the bad guy. And at the same time, there’s this struggle to want to be good. What the film does brilliantly is it puts you in this situation of, ‘Oh! He has no choice.’ He has to be doing this, and you see how painful it is.
It’s bad enough that Metamorpho didn’t choose to have his powers and look the way he does, but now he’s being strong-armed to harm one of the world’s greatest superheroes. Officially speaking, we don’t know how Lex Luthor is forcing Metamorpho to do his bidding. However, there is a shot in the most recent Superman trailer of the titular protagonist holding a green baby while Metamorpho creating tendrils to grab Super. It’s being speculated by fans that that baby is Metamorpho’s son, so if that’s accurate, this is a simple case of Luthor holding a loved one hostage. As if kidnapping Krypto wasn’t bad enough!
I’ll go out on a limb and say that eventually Metamorpho will get to turn against Lex Luthor and help Superman bring down the bald baddie. And although the first movie in the DC Universe doesn’t come out until July 11, I’m already hoping there will be more opportunities for Anthony Carrigan to play this character again, as he deserves more than just one story to be explored.