Justice League Writer Talks Working With Ray Fisher to Debut Cyborg As DC Film’s First Major Black Superhero

Justice League Snyder Cut writer Chris Terrio talked about working with Ray Fisher to bring Cyborg to the big screen. In a recent conversation with Vanity Fair, the scribe discussed his relationship with the star and their combined effort to really do DC’s first major Black superhero right during the film. Fisher has been vocal about his treatment on-set during the Joss Whedon reshoots. The final product bore out some of his concerns. After the Snyder Cut dropped, it only added more fuel to the flames online. Zack Snyder has been adamant for years now that Cyborg was the emotional heart and soul of his movie. Seeing the finished product on HBO Max only confirmed those statements. Terri’s own admissions in the interview show that they had really tried to understand the character and were hoping for a lot more when the time came for his solo outing.

“I wasn’t invited to the set, but obviously I know Ben, and I got to know Ray Fisher. We developed Cyborg together. Ray came to my apartment in the East Village, and he and I just would take long walks and talk about Cyborg and the responsibility of putting the first Black DC superhero in a movie onscreen,” Terrio began. “That was a big responsibility that we both understood and took very seriously. Remember, this was before Black Panther. There obviously have been some Black superheroes over the years, but none depicted with such a budget and such scale and in such a mainstream way.”

“Cyborg is the one character who can’t disguise himself. He lives in his skin. His otherness is a constant fact of his life. And that to me—and Ray and I discussed this—speaks about being a Black man in America. You cannot remove the otherness that people force upon you,” he added. “And therefore Cyborg—when he becomes the hero that he always should have been and was meant to be, that felt like something really strong that we wanted the world to see.”

In some previous comments on the LightCast Podcast, Fisher himself described that he was present in an early version of The Flash movie.

“About Rick’s Flash, I don’t really know too much about the behind-the-scenes stuff. Ultimately, as I understand it, they just couldn’t come together on what Rick wanted the story to be versus what the other folks may have wanted the story to be,” Fisher explained. “I’ve never had a specific conversation about what that was, but I know one thing: Rick is a dope dude and he’s a consummate professional. But also seeing that he’s a person of integrity and that if it’s not the story that he’s looking to tell, he’s fine to say, ‘Hey, listen, this is just not where I want to be. No harm, no foul.’ If that is the case, if that is what happened, good on him.”

Would you still want to see Cyborg? Let us know down in the comments!