Jesse Eisenberg believes his “poorly received” performance as Lex Luthor in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League really set back his career.
The Social Network actor, 41, spoke about the 2016 and 2017 films, and said that while he had been in other performances that were similarly poorly received, nothing else had such an impact as the DC films.
“I was in this Batman movie and the Batman movie was so poorly received, and I was so poorly received,” Eisenberg told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast. “I’ve never said this before and it’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way, because I was poorly received in something so public.
“I’ve been in poorly received things that just don’t see the light of day, and for the most part, no one knows. But this was so public, and I don’t read notices or reviews or movie press or anything, so I was unaware of how poorly it was received.”
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice grossed $874m worldwide, but fared very badly with critics. The Independent’s Jack Shepherd rated the film poorly, writing that the film “doesn’t have a rich or interesting enough plot to occupy three hours”.
Justice League fared similarly – it grossed $661m worldwide, but received a two-star rating from Geoffrey Macnab, who wrote: “This is surely the most infantile of recent superhero yarns – a film that squanders the talents of an impressive ensemble cast and eschews any meaningful characterisation in favour of ever more overblown special effects.”
The film’s reviews also saw the birth of the “Sad Ben Affleck” meme, where a video slowly focuses on Affleck’s sad face set to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” while Henry Cavill responds to a question about Batman v Superman’s poor reviews.
Eisenberg, who recently received two Golden Globe nominations for his film A Real Pain, added that he still loved performing as Luthor.
“To me, it was a chance to play this great character that this great writer wrote, and I loved doing that.
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“To play it is a joy, and to not play it isn’t something that I’m going to be ashamed to tell my kids about, because that is not an important genre in my life, even though I loved doing that movie.”
This comes as the first trailer for the highly anticipated new Superman film from director James Gunn was released, with fans ecstatic to see a beloved character.
The new film, titled Superman, will see David Corenswet take up the mantle of the Man of Steel, with a first snippet shared on Thursday (19 December).
Although the trailer doesn’t give much away about the story, nearly all the key characters are shown including Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillon), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi).
