EXCLUSIVE: Supergirl’s Peter Facinelli Discusses His Role as Maxwell Lord

Maxwell Lord is, of any character yet announced to appear on a DC Entertainment TV series, probably the one with the most unpredictable agenda.

Created as a kind of self-absorbed ringleader to the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League in the late ’80s, Lord was reinvented almost twenty years later as a homicidal villain who had been secretly embedding himself with superheroes for years, hoping to gain their trust so that he could make them less effective.

Since then, he’s been used as a member of the quasi-governmental organization Checkmate, as a straight-up villain, as a resurrected White Lantern and a reality-warping games master who terrorized his former Justice League. He’s appeared on Smallville and was briefly considered as a villain in George Miller’s unproduced Justice League: Mortal. And now he’s headed to CBS’s Supergirl as…well, it’s hard to know just what his role is, but he certainly seems to be setting out to woo Cat Grant and impress her kid.

Facinelli joined ComicBook.com on Supergirl‘s press line at this weekend’s New York Comic Con to discuss his role as one of the DC Universe’s most complicated villains — one who vehemently objects to that characterization.

What’s his relationship with the DEO like? Is he with them or against them or…?

I think there’s a gray area there. I don’t think that he’s ever with anybody. He’s definitely got his own perspective on things and his own agenda and whatever works for him is what he’ll gravitate towards if it’s going to help him.

I don’t think he’s evil in that sense. It’s just that there’s very clear good and bad and what Maxwell brings is a kind of a gray area. Don’t always be too sure what is good or bad. I think his perspective is that humanity should save themselves and that these outside sources — aliens, aka superheroes and -villains — are just interfering with the problems that we need to face, and the problems that we’re facing as humanity are way bigger than two superheroes battling it out.

Our planet in his mind is dying, so how do we fix that? Everything else is a distraction for him; it’s like, let’s not be distracted by two superheores fighting in the sky; we’ve got to figure out our own problems. And if you look at that perspective, he’s right. It’s not like he’s trying to take over the world; it’s his perspective on how we fix our problems.

Max always had kind of a bad relationship with Superman, even when he was ostensibly a good guy. Can we expect to see that color his perception of Supergirl a little?

Yeah, for sure. I think with SG, she is an adversary to him. He has this fascination with her power and he’s trying to think “If I could harness that, I could solve humanity’s problems.” But I don’t like her having those powers becuase I don’t want anybody to have to rely on one person too much and also I doin’t like the fact that when other superheroes have those powers they might be able to control us. It is adversarial in the sense that he doesn’t like Supergirl and is trying to get people to see that she’s not a good thing for us.