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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice‘s Lex Luthor could have looked very different.
Director Zack Snyder stopped by the Happy Sad Confused podcast to promote the upcoming second part of his Rebel Moon films for Netflix. Over the course of the conversation, host Josh Horowitz asked him if there was any truth to the fact that the studio wanted Tom Hanks or Adam Driver for the villain role.
“I think I did talk to Adam on the phone, yeah,” he said of the rumored castings. “Leonardo DiCaprio, I talked to him about it.”
While Snyder ultimately went with Jesse Eisenberg as Lex, starring opposite Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ben Affleck’s Batman, he revealed the Titanic star “had a lot of great ideas, actually, just in the meeting.”
“I think, in the end, he was like, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ But he was really smart about the material and really smart about the character,” the director shared. “In a lot of ways, I think he was the one that mentioned to me this idea about Superman fighting the Justice League at some point.”
Snyder explored DiCaprio’s idea that Superman could fight his allies in both his 2017 film Justice League, as well as 2021’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which was the filmmaker’s extended version that came in at four hours and two minutes.
Batman v Superman wasn’t the first time the Killers of the Flower Moon star was in the conversation to play someone in a superhero film. David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, previously told Horowitz that DiCaprio was also in talks to play a part in those films.
The screenwriter recalled in 2023, “I remember after The Dark Knight, the head of Warner Bros. at the premiere said, ‘You got to do the Riddler. Leo as the Riddler,’ saying to me, ‘You got to tell Chris, Leo is the Riddler.’”