Superman & Lois: Anti-Hero Director This Week’s Big Death

Elizabeth Henstridge, who starred in all seven seasons of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, was imported into the Arrowverse this week, directing the Superman & Lois episode “Anti-Hero.” The actor and director had previously helmed an episode of SHIELD, and then got serious about TV directing, and was “laser-focused” on Arrowverse chief Greg Berlanti. She succeeded (obviously), but what’s more: she got to direct an episode that was a game-changer for the second season of Superman & Lois. It also featured the death of a major character — one who Henstridge says she is a big fan of in the comics.

That would be Bizarro — a moment that had to be emotional, but which also had to deal with the realities of filmmaking. After all, most of his scenes involve Tyler Hoechlin playing both Superman and Bizarro, the latter under a ton of makeup, hair, and prosthetics.

“The logistics of having an actor as two different people, with a kind of a radical hair and makeup, CGI, costume, everything change, is a testament to the logistics of filming, and the people that figure out those logistics,” Henstridge told ComicBook. “Ian Samoil was my AD and he was just… It’s just a team effort, just the scheduling, just the trying to figure out how we’re going to shoot this, and it was just, that was one side of it.” 

While it was a challenge, Henstridge said she was excited to be given an episode that wasn’t just super-relevant to the ongoing plot, but which carried the emotional heft of “Anti-Hero.”

“Honestly, I was so excited and grateful to get that moment with Bizarro,” Henstridge told ComicBook. “I love him as a character, and I really, really wanted to do that justice. So I did quite a lot of research on how Bizarro passed in the comics, and what that looked like, and worked with hair and makeup to kind of evoke that. There’s an image that I had in all my prep documents, it was like, blood coming out of Bizarro’s eyes and nose. It’s pretty dark when you watch it because it’s at night, but that’s what we did, and we had the blood coming out. I think shooting something that’s based in a comic, I always want to try to be respectful of the comic and the origins, and so that was a moment that was really important to us to try to give respect to the comic and kind of how it happened there. And then Tyler’s just such a pro. He was just incredible.” 

“I think what makes it sing is the stillness,” Henstridge added. “There is that moment, that you’ve earned from having such massive fight scenes. You kind of earn that moment of reflection, and there’s so many things that are going through Superman’s head in that moment of coming face to face with his doppelganger, and what that means, and what they’ve lost by him saving Tal-Rho instead.

That big final scene featured three different characters who were villainous to one extent or another (Bizarro, Tal-Rho, and Mitchell Anderson), and Henstridge had to present each of them as “human.” That’s a little easier with Bizarro and Tal-Rho, who both acted in Superman’s interest in the fight, but Anderson was another story.

“I think the game plan is to always play the humanity of it,” Henstridge said. “I think that’s what makes the show so brilliant, is we get more time with these so-called super villains or superheroes and we really get to understand where their motivations come from. And yes, they may not be what we might hope we might do, but they’re all reacting to their circumstances. And I think, as an actor and then as a director, you want to approach everything without judgment and just play the reality of that character’s situation. Then, when you do that, you don’t really have to worry about playing the badness too much. I think you always try to play the good and then you get to kind of break a few audience’s hearts when things don’t don’t work out, because you just think, oh man, you just kind of had the wrong guidance in that point. And like you say, they’re not all bad. And yeah, it makes things a bit more juicy.”

Superman & Lois airs on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.