You know what they say: don’t judge a book by its cover. It turns out Joe Manganiello is actually a big geek like us!

Manganiello is a huge fan of the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, and was on a podcast called “Dragon Talk” this week to talk all about it. Lucky for us, he was also asked about playing Deathstroke in The Batman.

Manganiello explained that he’s read “almost” every comic book involving Deathstroke, and the way he’s physically preparing for the role is absolutely incredible. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

“I’m somebody that likes to start preparing way ahead of time. So I’ve read almost all the comic books involving him. Just to get the information out of them. Some of them are useful. Some of them are not going to be useful. Because ultimately the script—that’s my text. I have to play that. “I started katana training recently. Like live sword training and I started meeting with various martial arts teachers and discussing with them. “Ok, so what are the most offensive styles of martial arts”. Ones where you’re not waiting for someone to attack you but ones where you’re looking to make the attack. Then what are the most deadly ones? Where are the scrolls, the ancient Japanese scrolls that have these really deadly techniques that you don’t teach to the average student out the street? Something that only somebody who would go looking for it that are really really bad, you know, are dangerous. Like, what are those? “Ok, so now what are the stances? What are like some really unorthodox stances that someone who learns say Ninjutsu would stand in? Ok, so now what if that person lost an eye? If that person lost an eye how would they then alter the stance so that you would have better peripheral vision. What would that look like? So then you start cooking, and then you start building a story. Kind of outside-in. That’s like a very physical way to build a story. “Then on the other side of it, like I said, I’m looking at the script rather than the comic books. I mean the comic books are giving me a good general kind of area of what we’re talking about. Where this characters located. But the script is really like, you know. Because they might change the canon. There’s been like 3 or 4 different ways that he’s lost his eye. Are we doing one of those? Or are we doing it a completely new way? Like, I need to play that.”

You can listen to the entire Deathstroke conversation in the audio player below around the 01:10:40 mark.

SOURCE: Dragon Talk (via reddit)