{"id":158751,"date":"2025-09-21T07:28:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T07:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/158751\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T07:28:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T07:28:11","slug":"james-gunn-says-he-views-lex-luthor-as-incredibly-heroic-in-his-own-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/158751\/","title":{"rendered":"James Gunn says he views Lex Luthor as “incredibly heroic,” in his own way"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Gunn, whose various hats as co-head of DC Studios apparently include \u201cnever-ending one-man PR engine,\u201d has been making pretty frequent press rounds of late, promoting the ongoing second season of his HBO Max series Peacemaker<\/a>. But because Gunn is a dude who genuinely likes talking about superheroes (while also desperately trying to keep the actual secrets of the billion-dollar movie franchise he\u2019s now in charge of safe) he\u2019s also been rolling out lots of little tidbits for other DCU projects\u2014most notably 2027 Superman\u00a0sequel\u00a0Man Of Tomorrow. Last week<\/a>, Gunn revealed that he considered the movie to be as much about Nicholas Hoult\u2019s Lex Luthor as David Corenswet\u2019s Superman, and now he\u2019s gone into even more detail about his feelings about the character, including saying that he thinks there\u2019s something \u201cincredibly heroic\u201d about Luthor\u2014if you \u201ctake aside morality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gunn was talking to Mallory Rubin for\u00a0The Ringer-Verse<\/a>, in a conversation that was mostly focused on\u00a0Peacemaker. (Including some interesting commentary on how Gunn views characters when they pop up in projects with wildly different tones<\/a>.) But he\u2019s also clearly been thinking about Luthor a lot, responding to Rubin\u2019s question about what Gunn sees of himself in the famous villain with a long line of thoughts about his \u201cunderdog\u201d status. \u201cWe saw a lot about the evil part of Lex,\u201d Gunn notes of this summer\u2019s Superman<\/a>. \u201cHe\u2019s pretty evil. He, as a character, is really interesting. There\u2019s something, despite everything, that is incredibly heroic about Lex. Take aside morality, which is hard to do, but here is this guy who is saying, \u2018You can hold up a building. You can shoot down planes with your eyes. Fuck you, I\u2019m going to kick your ass because I\u2019m better than you.\u2019 I can\u2019t help but admire his tenacity and his ego. His ambition is beyond compare. He\u2019s the underdog. Yeah, sure, he\u2019s got a lot of corporate power that he can use to manipulate things, but he can\u2019t fly into outer space, lift up a building, or punch something across three states. He\u2019s a guy, and I fucking love that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the interview, Gunn let loose a few other drips of info, including the fact that he\u2019s been watching and enjoying the dailies from the horror-themed Clayface, due out next year, and expressed his excitement for doing a full-blown space adventure with\u00a0Supergirl. The one thing he continues to refuse to be baited about is Batman: When asked about where his mind is drifting when it comes to casting for the DCU\u2019s version of the Dark Knight, he only noted that he has \u201cguys I like,\u201d and that at least one \u201cpretty big star\u201d has approached him directly. But he also noted that he had \u201cguys\u201d in mind for Superman, too, all of whom lost out to Corenswet after auditions and screen testing, so who really knows? (Also, he says people shouldn\u2019t over-analyze what he mentions he\u2019s been watching on the official Peacemaker\u00a0podcast: He just\u00a0really\u00a0likes some of those Taylor Sheridan streaming shows, apparently.)<\/p>\n

James Gunn assures Waller-flowers he’s still “working” on Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller series<\/a>James Gunn’s Superman walked so that his Peacemaker could fuck<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Gunn, whose various hats as co-head of DC Studios apparently include \u201cnever-ending one-man PR engine,\u201d has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-158751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}