Joe Manganiello was a guest on “ID10T with Chris Hardwick” last week and spoke in great detail about all the preparation he did to play Deathstroke in The Batman when it was still Ben Affleck’s project. You can tell that Manganiello has a real love for the character, because when The Batman plans changed he put together a backstory and short script for a Deathstroke origin movie and got director Gareth Evans involved.
You can listen to Manganiello talk all about Deathstroke in the audio player below at the 01:07:00 mark. I’ve also included a transcript of his comments, courtesy of reddit.
When I met with Ben Affleck about Batman the meeting we were having was for Deathstroke. This is a real opportunity to figure out who this guy is on the inside. Like what he’s battling with. The best quote unquote — I hate calling them this but you know calling them a villain is understanding where they’re coming from.
There are villains who are the people who are opposing them but from the inside this is a person who is struggling with all types of things. I think it’s really interesting to tell that kind of a story and tell the truth emotionally of a story like that when you’re talking about a man who lost an eye, was betrayed, lost a son. These different types of aspects.
Then you couple that with real world military training. Then I started training at like a Ninjutsu dojo and started learning sword fighting. Started learning and understanding where those techniques come from. All the sudden this thing starts writing itself.
What I love doing is in an instance like that I’m able to, at the ground level, I’m able to go back and pitch all of my work. So I’m pitching them: “This is where I think he comes from. This is where I think he’s going. This is the military background. These are some articles that I pulled for you. I also interviewed these people over here.”
The Ninjustu school- there are scrolls that are written that have these ancient techniques that are not shared with students that are locked away because somebody is going to go into a bar and rip someones head off using one of these techniques. What are those techniques? Where are they? Could there theoretically be somebody that would go around and learn these insanely offensive techniques and become this incredible killer?
I’m rooting it in the world. I’m rooting it in something honest so it feels real. Then we’re talking about the emotional content.
Somewhere along that way I know that it was announced where the studio… there was talks with Gareth Evans and talks about an origin movie. I’m not giving news. I spent six months prior to all of those phone calls writing a backstory that was turned into sixteen pages which got turned into a treatment which then led to my Skype call with Gareth.
Thanks to Batman News Amer for the heads up!
