'Man of Tomorrow' Star Lars Eidinger Says Brainiac Is "Almost Shakespearean"

The new DC Universe is off to a strong start. In 2025, DC Studios officially launched its cinematic universe with the release of Superman, written and directed by the studio’s co-chairman, James Gunn. The movie received rave reviews and had a commendable performance at the box office, making a sequel inevitable. It was then announced last September that a new Superman film, titled Man of Tomorrow, is scheduled to release in theaters on Jul. 9, 2027. The highly anticipated sequel revolves around a “team-up” between Superman (David Corenswet) and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).

Of course, it takes a big villain to get two archenemies to team up. For Man of Tomorrow, that will come in the form of Brainiac. For a role as big as this, Gunn went in an interesting direction, casting theater actor Lars Eidinger. After small supporting roles in various movies and television projects, Brainiac is undoubtedly his biggest one yet. Despite the large-scale production, the actor said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he believes how these comic book adaptations are made isn’t so different from theater, comparing the iconography to that of Shakespeare:

“Last week I was on set during rehearsals and asked if I could watch some of the filming, which had already started. And I saw an actor in the Superman costume, suspended on wires in front of a blue screen. I looked at that image and thought: This is the essence of fiction. It’s as significant an image as Hamlet holding the skull: Superman, in that Superman pose, hanging from wires in front of a blue screen.”

Eidinger also discussed the villains he’s played in the past, and how the character-driven work of his independent productions might contrast with something like a blockbuster comic book movie. However, for the Man of Tomorrow actor, it was less about scale and more about his fundamental understanding of the characters and the subtext that can be found in the larger-than-life struggles of good versus evil:

“It’s not as different as you might think. Even if it seems surprising at first, these films have a serious philosophical ambition. They carry great allegorical weight for me. Take just the word ‘super’ — it’s used as a superlative, for something excellent, wonderful. But ‘super’ really only means ‘over’ or “above.’ So Superman is the Übermensch. You have the Super Ego. There’s already a deep psychological dimension built in.”

With these quotes, it seems that Gunn isn’t straying too far from his work in the MCU, in which he cast another theater actor, Chukwudi Iwuji, as cosmic supervillain The High Evolutionary in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Bringing actors who have a flair for the dramatic as these alien god-like beings helps make the story feel that much more intense. Though Eidinger never imagined himself in a major production like Man of Tomorrow, it still felt right to him: “Being in the Superman universe wasn’t a dream or burning desire for me. But now that it’s happening, I can see a certain inevitability in it, something almost fated.”