Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, The End of the Tour) found himself in a bit of hot water after comparing the sensory overload of an experience like Comic-Con to what he imagined being a target in a genocide physically feels like. In an interview with The Observer, he apologizes for hurting some people's feelings and talks about his role as Lex Luthor in the massively-anticipated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.



"Listen, the responsibility is on me to keep my guard up when discussing something that is going to be parsed. I'm not new to it, but I should be savvier. The truth of the matter is I had a wonderful experience at Comic-Con because people loved the movie that I was in. In my attempt to make a dumb, self-deprecating joke I maybe hurt people's feelings and that's wrong... whether or not people had a sense of humor is another story."



Eisenberg later spoke more in general about the spotlight that comes with being an actor and being a part of a massive franchise like Superman or Batman. "There's this two-pronged pressure that I feel. You do so many interviews and there's this tacit request to be honest and open and yet then there's this simultaneous flogging of a person who says things, says things that are 1 percent off center."



Speaking on his role as the villanous Lex Luthor, Eisenberg mentions that "in a lot of ways, Luthor is more of a stretch than any character you would do in an independent movie, which is normally the place you stretch. So in that way it was not at all compromised. If anything, it was the best, most advantageous role I've ever been given... it's because the opportunity to do an interesting character on a movie of that scale is incredibly rare. The character is written by the phenomenal writer Chris Terrio. His background is not in comic books, so he was coming at it from emotion and story and created this really wonderful character, as enigmatic as he is emotionally honest."



Comic book movies have changed since the days of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor. As a successful playwright and having recently authored his first book, Eisenberg enthusiastically buys in to the changes and Terrio's overall approach. "Now people expect the tone to be more realistic just because we live in a world where the average audience member has a sense of psychological motivations... [it raises the question] how can one man - Superman - have so much power? These are the kind of things that we talk about when we think about authoritarian states, when we talk about Vladimir Putin having a strong foothold in Eastern Europe. They're addressing geopolitics in this movie and not in a way that's pretentious or esoteric. Terrio cleverly ties in these really exciting superhero elements with these really sophisticated, philosophical themes in a much smarter, different way. That's what I like to do with my writing: to have these very sophisticated debates happen on very basic levels."



Six months until Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.