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November 5, 2015: Exclusive Interview - John Shea Discusses Career and Days as Lex Luthor
The Superman Super Site recently had an opportunity to speak with actor John Shea about his career including his memorable role as Lex Luthor on "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman".
In the following exclusive interview, Shea discusses his days as the iconic Superman villain as well as his starring roles in theater, film, and the upcoming TNT television series "Agent X" in which he will portray the President of the United States.
Super Site: One of your earliest acting roles was in the 1982 drama "Missing" in which you starred as American journalist Charles Horman opposite Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. What projects were you involved with prior to this casting and what are some memories that you have of this early role?
Shea: My first American feature film, "Missing" won the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for five Academy Awards. It launched me as a young star - suddenly roles on stage, in film, and on television were offered to me. It was a lucky turning point in my life. The director, Costa-Gavras, was an important mentor of mine. His script for "Missing" won the Oscar; he is a writer-director, a true artist, a passionate defender of human rights, generous and open. Jack Lemmon, who played my father, became a Hollywood god-father to me; Sissy Spacek, who played my wife, was smart and strong, naturally brilliant, and took her work very seriously, as we all did.My first film ever was for television, a biblical epic about the first Christmas called "The Nativity" that we shot in the desert around Almaria, Spain with an international cast. I played Joseph and Madeline Stowe played Mary. One night while we were shooting, a lion escaped from his cage and terrorized the set. They finally lured it to return by putting a crying baby lamb in the back of a Land Rover. When the lion leaped for the terrified lamb, they shut the rear of the Rover and - while the lion feasted on lamb - we shot the birth of baby Jesus. It was surreal and somehow appropriate that life and death echoed each other.
My first feature film was "Hussy," an English film noir. My co-star was the young Helen Mirren, now an Oscar winner, then a rising star of the British stage. She was funny and fearless and gorgeous. During our first week of shooting we had to shoot a nude love scene together. I was nervous. I barely knew Helen. "Don't be nervous, she said, I have a secret. I'll tell you tomorrow". Early the next morning on the set before we shot I knocked on her dressing room door. "What's your secret?", I pleaded, still anxious. "Open that", she said, handing me a bottle of red wine. I laughed. We took the bottle to the set and drank it as we shot, the only nude love scene I ever got to do. Helen was great and the film established me as a star in England where I shot many more films over the years and acted on stage in the West End in "The Normal Heart".
Super Site: Your role as Lex Luthor on "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" marked only the second time that this iconic character had been featured in a television series following "The Adventures of Superboy". How did you find out about the casting call and what was it like knowing you had gotten the part?
Shea: Keith Addis, my manager in LA, called me in about 1992 and told me that Warner Brothers was looking for an actor to play Lex Luthor in a new series called "Lois & Clark". I read the script by Debra Joy Levine I knew instantly how to play Luthor - that he should look like Cary Grant and think like Richard III, the Shakespearean villain. Modern villains don't look like villains, I thought, these days they wear expensive suits and look like investment bankers and thrill seekers who do risk arbitrage.During research for a French thriller I shot with Natalie Baye called "Honeymoon" ("Lune de Miel") a few years earlier, I had entered myself in character into psychoanalysis at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The head of the Abnormal Psychology Department taught me about sociopaths, that they were motivated by unconscious appetites. I knew that Luthor was a classic sociopath. I put on my best suit and drove to Warner Brothers and read some scenes for Leslie Mooves, the president of Warner television. "That's it", he said. Leslie brought me to ABC the next day where I auditioned for the president, Bob Iger, and his team. When they offered me the role I took it in stride, like Luthor would, having felt fated for the part.
Super Site: Lex Luthor has been portrayed various times in live-action media beginning with Lyle Talbot in the 1950 serial "Atom Man vs. Superman". What steps did you take in learning more about the character and in putting your own unique stamp on your portrayal?
Shea: The Luthor I knew best was Gene Hackman's turn in "Superman: The Movie" with Chris Reeve. Chris was a friend of mine in New York - we had the same agent and worked on stage together so I had watched his film carefully. Hackman's Luthor was a mad, comic masterpiece as played by him and written by screenwriter David Newman, another friend. Debra Joy Levine's and Leslie Mooves' innovation was in mixing genres and turning the Superman mythology into something new: action-adventure laced with romantic comedy. A love triangle between Lois, Clark, and Lex that was played naturalistically. Two powerful men competing for a smart and beautiful woman, but played without any comic book exaggeration. My Luthor got to woo a woman while he secretly plotted his enemy's demise, just like King Richard lll, a role I had played on stage.My Luthor thought that Superman cheated in their competition and therefore was inferior. My Luthor thought that he was the real super man, an ubermench, a lord of all he had personally created - a self-made man and proud of it. He thought Superman was a trust-fund baby who had inherited his gifts by an accident of birth. Clark Kent hadn't really earned anything - it was all given to him by being born on Krypton. I was free to discuss these ideas with Debra and her team of writers, who were of similar mind, and we had fun weaving such competitive attitudes into scenes, dialogue, and subtext as the series evolved.
Super Site: The season one finale of "Lois & Clark" featured the "death" of the Lex Luthor character followed by only a brief return in season two. What were the reasons behind this drastic shift in regard to your character and did you agree with the changes?
Shea: Right after we shot the pilot for "Lois & Clark", my first wife, Laura, our young son, Jake, and I moved back to New York. Laura wasn't happy in LA. Then the TV series got picked up for a full season and so I had to commute from Manhattan to Burbank for 22 episodes; I spent three days a week shooting at Warner Brothers and four days with my family in the city. Flying back and forth across the country for a year took its toll on my family life so I went to ABC and asked them to let me out of my contract. We made a deal that benefited us both.For the next two seasons I did 2 episodes each season, special Lex Luthor episodes, for the sweeps rating period. They were very successful and great fun for me to return to. And it was better for the series; with Lex Luthor gone, they introduced what I called "kleenex villains", pop-up disposable bad guys that Superman could vanquish each week. Then I would show back up as Lex and spar with him. In Season Two, I returned as Lex with an archetypal shaved head after my fall from grace; with nothing to lose I got to create havoc, woo and almost win Lois, and drive the big fly guy crazy.
In a Season Two Luthor episode I revealed myself to Lois in an alley pretending to be an old man in a wheelchair and she realizes that I've faked my suicide. She angrily accuses me of having done horrible things in Metropolis. "Yes!", I say. "I did them, but I did them all for you!" I took that sociopathic self-defense straight from Richard III who says the same thing to a woman in the famous Lady Anne Wooing Scene in Act One. I pitched the idea of rewriting Shakespeare for Luthor and Lois to the writers and they went for it! I had to spend three hours every day getting in and out of the bald makeup but it was worth every minute of tedium knowing of our secret homage to Shakespeare's greatest villain, the one who had been my inspiration from the start.
Super Site: "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" truly was a wonderful series and received a recent resurgence when it aired on the Hub Network from 2012 - 2014. Looking back, what are some of your fondest memories while on the set and do you still keep in touch with your co-stars?
Shea: Teri Hatcher, Dean Cain, and I are bonded on some level for life. I loved working with them both. Teri was a dream leading lady - smart, funny, and beautiful inside and out - we had an easy rapport from the moment we met. Dean was a natural actor, Princeton smart, a great athlete, but with a winning humility and genuine sweetness that women intuited about him. We laughed a lot.One day I was shooting a scene on a telephone in Luthor's office, a cigar clenched in my fist. I was calling the Mayor of Metropolis (Sonny Bono) and, angry with him, would slam down my phone as the camera tracked in for a closeup of me. "Cut! Let's do it again!", the director would say. Take after take of the tricky shot was ruined for one reason or another. Finally a producer told us we had time for one more take and that was it. The camera reset. The crew fell silent. Again, I puffed on my cigar as I called the Mayor and then, angry, slammed down the phone. The camera dollied in slowly for my closeup and for the first time, nobody called "cut!". But what the fifty man crew couldn't see was that the hot burning ember at the end of my cigar had flown into the air when I slammed down the phone and had landed on the back of my hand. I could smell my flesh burning as the camera came closer to my face. I knew this was our last chance so I just held it - the sizzle of skin, the smell of flesh, the pain - held for what seemed like a year until, with tears in my eyes, I stared into the camera lens insane with pain. "Cut!" the director called. "Great work, John! Very intense.Very Lex!" At lunch I told Teri and Dean how I had achieved my great acting moment and we still laugh about it. I still have the scar on my hand, but that's good because it brings back golden days with good people in a show that launched me again around the world, this time as a TV star.
Super Site: Following "Lois & Clark", you starred as bio-geneticist Adam Kane on the highly rated "Mutant X" television series. What led you to this role and what was it like returning to the realm of a superhero-based television series?
Shea: In 2000 I got a call from my manager, Eli Selden, who told me I'd been offered a two year commitment to star in a new series for Warner Brothers called "Mutant X", based on Marvel's "X-Men" mythology. I knew that it was a rich world to to explore and I was ready to return to television. After "Lois & Clark" I had co-written and directed "Southie", an indy feature film starring Donnie Wahlberg, Rose McGowan, Amanda Peet, Anne Meara, and Lawrence Tierney. Then I went through a difficult divorce, worked in the theatre Off-Broadway for two years, got re-married, and had a baby daughter, Miranda. With "Mutant X" I felt the universe was offering me a chance to return to mainstream entertainment. My wife, Melissa MacLeod, and I moved to Toronto to shoot the series and I embraced it whole heartedly."Mutant X" fans have been loyal and I always felt badly that the series ended abruptly after three seasons due to a Canadian company's corporate insensitivity. "Mutant X" was a global hit, fun to do, had an underlying theme of tolerance for those who don't conform to the norm, mixed action and adventure with drama, had kick-ass stunts, cool effects, and featured a gung-ho cast of actors who dedicated themselves to making the series great fun.
Super Site: You were recently a guest at the annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis, IL this past June. What was it like meeting all the fans of this beloved series all these years later and visiting the "Official Hometown of Superman" for the first time?
Shea: I'm lucky to have played Lex Luthor and I feel a responsibility to share him with the fans who watched our series. The journey for me to Metropolis, Illinois was epic - a boat ride, three connecting flights to the mid-west, and a two hour drive late at night across Kentucky. It was all worth it when the sun rose and I saw the sea of Superman fans flow up and down Main Street, saw his 30' statue in front of City Hall, met folks from all over the world who had come to connect with that special energy generated when people of like mind come together. I was treated generously by the promoters and deeply appreciated their hospitality. But, I want to know; where is the 30' statue of Lex Luthor?Super Site: In addition to your many roles on television and in film, you have starred in various plays on and off Broadway and currently hold the title of Artistic Director Emeritus at the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket. What have been some of your most memorable roles on stage and all-time favorite productions to direct?
Shea: I made my Broadway debut at 26 playing a Jewish yeshiva boy in "Yentl". Since then I have done 25 plays in New York, in Chicago, and in London. I was trained as a classical actor at Yale Drama School and love the theatre. For the last six years I have been artistic director of the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket where I helped produce 40 major productions and a 100 smaller ones for audience from all over who visit the island and crave the real thing: live theatre. I recently directed *Dracula* with Tony Award winning designs by Edward Gorey; each year I direct Orson Welles' adaptation of "Moby Dick" under the skeleton of a 50' sperm whale in the Whaling Museum. I play Captain Ahab. Ahab and Luthor have something in common - an unquechable fire that burns in their belly that drives them to do things mere mortals don't dare.Super Site: Your next starring role will be as US President Thomas Eckhart on the upcoming TNT series "Agent X" alongside such talented stars as Sharon Stone, James Earl Jones, and former "Supergirl" star, Helen Slater. What can you tell us about this exciting new series and what fans have to look forward to when it debuts on TNT this Sunday, November 8th at 9:00pm?
Shea: After I finished directing my second film, a romantic thriller called "Grey Lady" set on Nantucket in the off-season - it stars Eric Dane, Natalie Zea, Adrian Lester, and Amy Madigan, - I then turned my attentions to acting in "Agent X." This new series is an action-adventure political thriller for TNT produced by Armyan Bernstein, my friend who founded Beacon Pictures. It's a thrill ride and stars Jeff Hephner as an American James Bond secret agent, a black-ops patriot, who risks his life to save his country. Sharon Stone, an Oscar nominated actress, plays the Vice President in charge of the "Agent X" program. It's our premise that there have been Agent X's since John Adams was VP; men who fight our enemies, both foreign and domestic, when no one else can do the job. The series is great fun, filled with surprises, state of the art stunts, and great acting.I play the President, but I've been the Vice President, so I know about our secret agent and how the program works. Sharon is perfect as an outsider to Washington who discovers what her real responsibilities as VP are. Once again I've been lucky to be paired with a great actress who is smart, fierce, and passionate, and who is as dedicated to her acting craft as she is beautiful. Helen Slater shows up at the end of the first season as my First Lady. Again I got lucky and hope that Superman fans will enjoy an insiders' understanding that Lex Luthor and Supergirl now run the White House.
The series debuts on TNT this Sunday, November 8th, at 9:00pm. The episodes will be available on the TNT website the day after they air. Fans can also follow me on Twitter at #JohnVictorShea.
Super Site: Thank you so much for taking the time to participate in our interview! It was an absolute pleasure to meet you at the Superman Celebration and hopefully we'll meet again soon.
Shea: Thank you Neil! I appreciate your interest in my career and the thought that went into your questions. There is certainly a direct line between "Lois & Clark" and "Agent X" and you are the one to have drawn it.
