James Gunn, whose various hats as co-head of DC Studios apparently include “never-ending one-man PR engine,” has been making pretty frequent press rounds of late, promoting the ongoing second season of his HBO Max series Peacemaker. 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’s now in charge of safe) he’s also been rolling out lots of little tidbits for other DCU projects—most notably 2027 Superman sequel Man Of Tomorrow. Last week, Gunn revealed that he considered the movie to be as much about Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor as David Corenswet’s Superman, and now he’s gone into even more detail about his feelings about the character, including saying that he thinks there’s something “incredibly heroic” about Luthor—if you “take aside morality.”
Gunn was talking to Mallory Rubin for The Ringer-Verse, in a conversation that was mostly focused on Peacemaker. (Including some interesting commentary on how Gunn views characters when they pop up in projects with wildly different tones.) But he’s also clearly been thinking about Luthor a lot, responding to Rubin’s question about what Gunn sees of himself in the famous villain with a long line of thoughts about his “underdog” status. “We saw a lot about the evil part of Lex,” Gunn notes of this summer’s Superman. “He’s pretty evil. He, as a character, is really interesting. There’s 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, ‘You can hold up a building. You can shoot down planes with your eyes. Fuck you, I’m going to kick your ass because I’m better than you.’ I can’t help but admire his tenacity and his ego. His ambition is beyond compare. He’s the underdog. Yeah, sure, he’s got a lot of corporate power that he can use to manipulate things, but he can’t fly into outer space, lift up a building, or punch something across three states. He’s a guy, and I fucking love that.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gunn let loose a few other drips of info, including the fact that he’s 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 Supergirl. 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’s version of the Dark Knight, he only noted that he has “guys I like,” and that at least one “pretty big star” has approached him directly. But he also noted that he had “guys” 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’t over-analyze what he mentions he’s been watching on the official Peacemaker podcast: He just really likes some of those Taylor Sheridan streaming shows, apparently.)
