Zachary Levi is excited to trade blows with Shazam’s powerhouse “doppelgänger” Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson) when the archenemies crossover in a future sequel.
“The fact that I now get to — even though I’m not his twin, necessarily — but I get to be the Captain Marvel to his Black Adam, he gets to be the Black Adam to my Captain Marvel, that I get to fight Dwayne the Rock Johnson in an action movie? Are you crazy?” an enthusiastic Levi said at FAN EXPO Boston, attended by ComicBook.com. “I get to punch the Rock in the face, people! I get to do that! Who gets to punch the Rock in the face? It’ll probably be in his contract, ‘Not allowed to punch me.’”
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Knowing any actor cast as Shazam would eventually appear opposite the brawny Johnson — who “has muscles on top of muscles” and looks “like what comics looked like in the late ’90s,” Levi said, specifically referencing the Herculean superheroes illustrated by Rob Liefeld — Levi passed on an audition, believing the filmmakers wanted an actor capable of passing as Johnson’s “twin.”
“I was aware, like many of us, that he had been connected to and essentially cast as Black Adam before the auditions and stuff for Shazam! came around, because he had been attached years prior,” Levi said. “And I knew that, and I knew that Black Adam was essentially the evil doppelgänger of Captain Marvel. Like twinsies, but with different colored outfits and different dispositions.”
“So two months before I got the job for Shazam, I got an audition email from my agency saying, ‘Hey, we got you an audition for the role of Shazam in Shazam!‘ I was like, ‘Aren’t they looking for the Rock’s twin? This seems like I’d be wasting everybody’s time,’” Levi continued. “And they’re like, ‘We don’t really know.’ The response was basically the [shrugging emoji]. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna [audition], I’ll just embarrass myself.’ So I turned the audition down.”
Two months later, Levi agreed to test for a supporting role. “And I put myself on tape for that, and like a week later I was Shazam,” Levi said. “Like the whole thing was super crazy and magical.”
Levi expects to cross paths with Black Adam in Shazam! 3, after Johnson appears in his own solo movie anticipated to begin filming in 2020.
“I can say that as far as I know, Black Adam is not going to be in the second Shazam!, because the idea is that they want to go and do a standalone Black Adam movie first,” Levi said at Germany’s CCXP Cologne convention over the summer. “And then it would kind of be, if we do a third Shazam! and a second Black Adam, kind of [parallel] like that, that’s where we would [meet].”
