Heroes need villains. Batman has his Joker. Obi-Wan has his Darth Vader. The X-Men have Magneto.
Each actor who takes on a bad-guy role must deal with the same problem other actors have faced: bad guys generally don’t believe they are doing anything wrong. Each actor must find the way to play evil while maintaining the humanity of the character.
No villain has caused more headache for a superhero than Lex Luthor. The nemesis of Superman has done his evil deeds in comic books, TV shows and in feature films. Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey takes on the role of Lex Luthor for “Superman Returns.”
“In Lex’s case there must be something about him that loves a challenge,” Spacey said of his character’s evil ways. The actor was at the Century Plaza Hotel for a series of interviews to promote the new comic book-inspired movie.
“He says it at one point: It’s brain over brawn,” Spacey said. “… You are not thinking about playing this evil, villainous character. You are trying to play what each scene is about and what the character is trying to get.”
He understands that the audience tends to categorize characters into roles of good and evil. Spacey can’t allow himself to see the role in such black-and-white terms.
“Otherwise you would be standing around twisting your mustache,” Spacey said, alluding to the way villains of melodramas act. “And I have no hair to twist.”
Spacey did an evil double in 1995 in the films “Seven” and “The Usual Suspects.” His “Seven” character was a killer who used the seven sins as scenarios for his murders. He couldn’t even play that twisted character as being someone who thought he was committing acts of evil.
Spacey became a little cautious about playing the bad guy in films because it looked like Hollywood executives were beginning to think of him exclusively that way.
The chance to play Lex Luther was enough to bring Spacey back to his bad-guy ways.
The approach he finally took to playing Luthor was to make him the ultimate capitalist.
“For him it has always been about land,” Spacey said. “I always loved the scene where he crystallizes his philosophy with ‘I just want my cut.’ That is capitalism at its soul.”
