Rachel Brosnahan as his reporter girlfriend Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as his scheming scientist businessman nemesis Lex Luthor. All three actors feel born to play these parts (even if Hoult originally auditioned for Superman himself).
/Film’s Bill Bria spoke with these three actors about their work on “Superman,” with Hoult discussing how he researched Lex’s character and inhabited it. One of the Superman comics he read that stuck with him the most was writer Brian Azzarello and artist Lee Bermejo’s 2005 mini-series “Lex Luthor: Man of Steel.” That book turns Luthor from the villain in Superman’s story to the antihero of his own story. The plot unfolds from Lex’s POV, and the inner monologue is his, so we feel how he sees Superman (who stays mostly silent and only appears in the distance) as a dragon to slay.
Hoult continued:
“There was a dialogue from that [book] that Lex says, that it kind of instantly jumped out at me. And then, that kind of became a little bit of a mantra for my Lex, but that was quite early on. And that became like an early seed that I would kind of carry with me.”
Unfortunately, Hoult didn’t elaborate and say specifically which line this was. But we can make some educated guesses, because in “Superman,” Gunn characterizes Lex a lot like how Azzarello did.
