Supergirl season 4 spoilers: First look at Jon Cryer’s Lex Luthor
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The CW released the image above earlier today, and all signs certainly point towards his first episode on March 17 as being especially memorable. The current synopsis for this episode (per TVLine) offers up a good sense of some of what lies ahead for the character:
Lex Luthor reaches out from prison to enlist Lena into one of his plans and will stop at nothing to get her on board, even if that means leveraging the life of one of her friends.
Clearly, Lex is still all sorts of evil, and we do like how the show is presenting Luthor as a character. Cryer certainly looks the part here — the idea was probably to get someone on board who can bring something new to the character, as opposed to just mimicking something that was done by either Michael Rosenbaum on Smallville or Jesse Eisenberg in the recent DC cinematic universe. Cryer has the potential to play evil rather well, and he does have ties to the comics already after playing Lenny Luthor in one of the old Superman movies.
We understand the prevailing criticism
We’ve heard the complaints that one of the most notable villains in the comic-book world can’t be played by a guy best known for being Ducky and Alan Harper. Our response to that is to check out some of Cryer’s dramatic work, since he does have a lot more range than people are giving him credit for. This is still a different sort of role for him, but we don’t think the producers would have taken the leap with him unless they felt confident that he was going to produce evil results.
As for the fact that Cryer is significantly older than Katie McGrath and also just five years younger than Brenda Strong (who plays matriarch Lillian Luthor), this is far from the first time we see this sort of thing happen in TV. On Blue Bloods, for example, Tom Selleck is only six years younger than Len Cariou, who plays his father. What matters more than age is how someone inhabits the character — if Cryer can make a supervillain in a world like Supergirl’s believable, he can certainly play a little bit younger than his age in real life. We don’t think it’s all that much of an issue.
Related News – Check out more information on the next new Supergirl episode
Are you excited to see what Jon Cryer brings to the table as Lex Luthor on Supergirl? Be sure to share now in the comments. (Photo: The CW.)