The Snyder Cut of Justice League was a long time coming, with fans fervently petitioning its release for close to two and a half years before finally getting their way. Whether it can correct the missteps of Joss Whedon’s version remains to be seen, but now that the film is making its way to HBO Max, teasers and snippets of information are flying out faster than Superman racing to save the day. Among these was the reveal of the actor who played Darkseid in Zack Snyder’s film, and no, it isn’t a certain WWE wrestler.
https://twitter.com/Ray__Porter/status/1263982099377188864
Darkseid was built up to be the big bad of the DCEU and his appearance at the end of the first film would have set up Justice League 2. That seems likely to still be the plan and a sequel could largely depend on how well the Snyder Cut performs.
Ray Porter recently spoke about how the voice acting role was a challenging experience, although he hasn’t heard the villain’s post-edit voice yet.
“You’ll hear it when I hear it. I went through a few different sort of vocal gymnastic things in kind of trying to figure out the voice. I needed it to be understandable, but it needed to be a voice that was not of this Earth. And that’s what I tried to go for. I can’t wait to hear it either, because also, while I did this voice and everybody was really, really nice about it. I know that in post they probably did stuff to it, and I can’t wait to hear that. Plus, the voice that I did, it wouldn’t be something that I could really project. It’s hard, hard on the vocal cords.”
The ruler of the planet Apokolips has been prominently featured in countless DC comic books and animated movies, and while the MCU might have gotten the jump on creating a terrifying arch-villain on screen, the reverse was true in print. Thanos’ creation was inspired by two of DC’s own characters, Metron and Darkseid.
Interestingly, while actor Josh Brolin was both the voice and mo-cap model for Thanos, Ray Porter is only providing the voice for Darkseid, with the character being rendered using CGI animation for his movie appearance.
It’s definitely an exciting time for comic book fans, more so if Justice League does well and we get another gigantic pantheon of heroes and villains to rival that of Marvel’s established cinematic universe. With a reported runtime of close to four hours and an additional budget of between $20 million to $30 million, that’s enough time and money to really do justice to the franchise, so here’s hoping that Snyder can deliver. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the trailer to drop.