Michael Shannon says he once turned down a role in Star Wars because he doesn’t take interest in big franchises.
In an interview for Empire magazine’s print edition, as reported by Insider, Shannon said major franchise films “take a lot of time and I don’t find them very stimulating to work on” as he said he turned down a Star Wars role.
While Shannon did not clarify which Star Wars movie or role he was once offered, the actor did confess that “I don’t ever want to get stuck in a franchise.”
“I don’t find them interesting and I don’t want to perpetuate them,” he said of franchise films. “If I’m making something, I want there to be some kind of purpose to it — I don’t want to make mindless entertainment.”
“The world doesn’t need more mindless entertainment,” he added. “We’re inundated with it.”
Shannon’s latest on-screen role is in the superhero movieThe Flash, in which he returns as his villain General Zod from 2013’s Man of Steel.
The actor said in the interview that he felt Zod’s inclusion in The Flash was “actually a very relevant story” as he explained he was originally drawn to Man of Steel over a decade ago because it promised just one appearance for his character.
“It’s basically looking at a civilization that destroyed their own planet and think the solution is to go off and destroy another,” Shannon told Empire of Zod, who seeks to turn Earth into a new version of Krypton, the planet he and Superman are from, in both Man of Steel and The Flash.
“When you hear that hypothetically, if we destroy the Earth, we might go live on Mars — it’s the same thing. I didn’t look at Zod as a villain,” the actor said. “I just saw him as a guy whose job is to protect his people.”
Shannon added that he was “pretty shocked to hear about this reprisal of the role” for The Flash, though he obliged DC Studios by returning for another appearance as Zod.
“But I like the story that The Flash is telling and I wasn’t there for a long amount of time — I was just there a couple of weeks — so it didn’t break my back to do it,” he told Empire.
Shannon worked with The Flash costar Ezra Miller on the new movie. He recalled that Miller, 30, was “very kind to me when I was there” when Vanity Fair asked him for his thoughts on the various controversies surrounding Miller in May.
“It’s difficult to talk about, but I always give people a lot of slack in this business, because there’s a lot of people in this business that have issues,” he said at the time.
“And some people have more privacy than others… Anytime somebody is out in the spotlight getting picked on, I feel for them. Even if it’s warranted, it’s still a horrible situation.”
The Flash is in theaters now.
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