Jon Cryer makes his debut as Lex Luthor in the Sunday, March 17 episode of Supergirl titled “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and to promote it, the actor participated in a Q&A following a screening of the episode that was hosted by The CW.
The character of Lex has been portrayed by many other actors in the past, including Gene Hackman who Cryer worked with in Superman IV: The Quest For Peace where he played Lex’s nephew, Lenny. When asked if he had planned out his take on the character prior to starting, Cryer revealed that he didn’t really know until the script came in.
“This was one of the few roles I took without reading it,” Cryer recalled. “Jessica [Queller] had told me a little bit about what they wanted to do, sort of bare bones, but for me, I really had to wait until I got the actual words [to see] ‘who is this guy and what does he talk like?’ I had to wait until I saw that to figure out where we wanted to go.”
“We talked about who we loved,” he revealed, bringing up some names of Luthors past. “Obviously, we loved Hackman, and I was a big fan of Michael Rosenbaum from Smallville, but it was never quite articulated [how we would do it]. We always kind of left it up in the air and said ‘let’s see where this goes’.”
And what was it like to be a Luthor again?
“It was lovely. I had a certain amount of familiarity,” he laughed. “I was very excited about working with Katie McGrath and I love the whole story that they have set up for this season. I felt like Lenny was a branch on the family tree that fell off pretty literally, and was rotting on the ground, basically, for a long while, so I feel like this was my chance to reclaim it and do it a little more justice… or injustice, as it were.”