Justice League Star Joe Morton Reveals How He Joined the DCEU

With the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League confirming a different trajectory of Joe Morton‘s Silas Stone, the actor recently reflected on first joining the DC Extended Universe and how quickly he was thrown into a fantastical world, which was juxtaposed by his work on a project with dramatic, real-world relevance. Despite the drastic contrast between the projects, Morton still appreciated the opportunity to get involved in the fantastical franchise, with Justice League‘s costumes and special effects feeling like an “elaborate Halloween costume party.” Zack Snyder’s Justice League is currently streaming on HBO Max, as well was the black and white “Justice Is Gray” version of the adventure.

“When I got a chance to talk to Zack, I was in an airport. So he told me what was going on, what he wanted to do and would I be interested, and I said, ‘Absolutely. I thought, ‘This sounds really exciting,’” Morton recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “He explained that the introduction would be in Batman v Superman, and then the actual thing would happen in Justice League. I thought it sounded great. “I’m not quite sure it was fully imagined by that point. I hadn’t really read the comic books, but I knew that you would see the reconstruction of Victor into Cyborg in Batman v Superman. And then I knew that there’d be more detail in Justice League, but I didn’t quite know what the detail was going to be.”

He continued, “I was doing a play at the time. I was doing a play here in New York called Turn Me Loose, which is about Dick Gregory. And it’s a very realistic, very funny, very hard-biting play about the Civil Rights Movement, as well as his comedy and the death of Medgar Evers. It was a very real kind of thing. So I ended up having to do the two of them at the same time, and when I read Justice League, I felt, ‘This is going to be a very interesting contrast.’ And to be quite honest, when I was in the middle of doing the play, I got on the plane for my first day on Justice League and it felt like moving from a very real situation to a very elaborate Halloween costume party.”

In the theatrical cut of Justice League, Silas was only minimally featured, but as we saw in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Silas gets himself involved in a lot more intense action.

“So I was enjoying all of it. I thought, ‘This is great,’” the actor recalled. “But literally, when I got to that first day, they put me in a harness and those creatures were flying me over a rail and down into this basement. I thought, ‘This is just bizarre.’ I had just played Dick Gregory, so my mind was in a whole other place in terms of what I had been doing. And then, to walk into this world, the contrast was enormous in terms of going from a reality to an absolute fiction.”

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.