Director Zack Snyder visited the Happy Sad Confused podcast to promote the upcoming second part of his Rebel Moon movies for Netflix. During the conversation, host Josh Horowitz asked him if it was true 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 about the rumored casting. “Leonardo DiCaprio, I talked to him about it.”
While Snyder ended up casting Jesse Eisenberg as Lex, 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 of Superman fighting his allies in both his 2017 movie Justice League, as well as 2021’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which was the filmmaker’s extended version that was four hours and two minutes long.
Batman v Superman wasn’t the first time the Killers of the Flower Moon star was considered to play someone in a superhero movie. A writer who worked on Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy previously said that DiCaprio was also discussed to play the Riddler in those films.