Nicholas Hoult Looked To Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor

Batman has the Joker. The Fantastic Four have Galactus. Spider-Man has the Green Goblin. And Superman? A good Superman always needs his Lex Luthor – a super-smart nemesis, often with sizeable resources to try and make Kal-El’s life a misery. In the Richard Donner films, he was memorably played by the slow, great Gene Hackman (famously going huge). More recently he got a Zuckerberg-flavoured take from Jesse Eisenberg in the Snyderverse films. And in Superman Returns… well, somebody played him there too.

Now, in James Gunn’s much-anticipated Superman, playing opposite David Corenswet’s Man Of Steel as Lex is Nicholas Hoult – and he’s taking inspiration from several previous Lex performances. “Gene’s one of my all-time faves, just as an actor in general. I went back and watched Gene,” Hoult tells Empire. “And Michael Rosenbaum, who was the first Lex I saw, growing up watching Smallville [on TV]. It’s interesting when you play a character that’s been played before — you’re working from a different script, but it’s fun to draw inspiration from all of those places.”

Earlier in his career, Hoult’s comic book role of choice was the more heroic Beast in the later run of X-Men movies – but now, he’s at a point where he prefers playing more twisted outsider roles. “I’m gonna keep getting darker and stranger until people are like, ‘No!! Too far!’,” he laughs, looking to the future.”I don’t have a master plan. [But] it seems like a lot of the performances that I grew up loving, or specifically when actors would go on runs of things, [it] seemed to be in their thirties and forties. So I’ve always been excited about this period of my career.” Bring on more twisted Lex Luthor schemes.

Read Empire’s full career-spanning Nicholas Hoult interview – talking Superman and beyond – in The Fantastic Four: First Steps issue, on sale Thursday 5 June. Pre-order a copy online here. Superman comes to UK cinemas from 11 July.