Smallville Co-Creator Recalls Zachary Levi’s Disastrous Lex Luthor Audition

The 20th Anniversary of Smallville has been getting the noughties show some attention this weekend, and with the complete series making its Blu-ray debut this week, it has been the perfect time for series creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough to pack in a number of interviews to look back at the show and some of the stories that come with its history. Amongst the tales from the production of Smallville, one story that came up while the pair spoke to the Hollywood Reporter is the time Shazam! star Zachary Levi auditioned for the role of Lex Luthor in the show years before he finally found fame in Chuck and moved on to bigger better things. It seems that the audition left a lasting impression on both the producers and Levi himself, but not in a good way.

It is not quite as simple as Zachary Levi arriving and bombing in his first audition though, to the contrary, it appears that he actually did so well in his initial audition that he was pretty much guaranteed the role, but when he was taken to see Warner Bros. as the producers’ choice of Lex Luthor, things just fell apart.

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“Zach Levi did an amazing audition for Lex. Incredible,” Gough told The Hollywood Reporter. “We all went into The WB with Zach to be Lex. That audition was kind of a disaster. In leaving the audition, I remember thinking ‘Oh, that was the biggest chance of his life.’ And then he went on to incredible success. So you just never know.”

Out of pure professional courtesy, no one ever spoke about the audition again until Levi mentioned it himself while speaking on the Inside of You podcast with Michael Rosenbaum – the man who did go on to play Lex Luthor in the series. While both producers and Levi have now mentioned the existence of this tragic audition, we can only hope that Levi will elaborate on it sometime in the future, possibly as part of his Shazam! Fury of The Gods promotional tour next year.

Levi only recently wrapped filming on the sequel to the 2019 hit movie Shazam!, which was written almost as soon as the first movie hit the box office and was originally meant to film in mid-2020, and at DC Fandome this weekend fans were given a behind the scenes look at the movie, which is starting to look like it could be well worth the wait. The film sees the return of pretty much everyone from the first movie including Asher Ashmore as Billy, Jack Dylan Grazer as Freddy Freeman, Faithe Herman as Darla Dudley, Ian Chen as Eugene Choi, Jovan Armand as Pedro Peña, and Grace Fulton as Mary Bromfield, along with their Shazam-ed counterparts (in the same order!) Zachary Levi, Adam Brody, Meagan Good, Ross Butler, D.J. Cortona, and Grace Fulton (doing double-duty as her superheroic self). Likewise, Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews return as their foster parents Rosa and Victor Vásquez, and Djimon Hounsou as the wizard Shazam.

The movie is currently expected to arrive in movie theaters on June 2nd, 2023 almost exactly a year after Dwanye Johnson’s Black Adam brings the Shazam! offshoot to screens. This news comes to us from The Hollywood Reporter.

Topics: Smallville

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