While Ray Porter has officially confirmed that he plays Darkseid in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, fans eager to hear Porter’s voice for the classic DC Comics baddie are just going to have to wait. Porter said during an interview with LightCast on YouTube that he will not perform his Darkseid voice ahead of the film’s release. Instead, fans will just have to wait until the Snyder Cut of the film makes its debut on HBO Max sometime in 2021.
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“There’s been a lot of questions on Twitter today, ‘Can you do the voice?’” Porter said. “It’s like no, that’s not going to happen. Let’s wait until 2021. You’ll hear it when I hear it [laughs].”
Over the weekend, Porter confirmed that he is in fact playing Darkseid in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, sharing the news on Twitter. Snyder himself had previously mentioned that Porter was associated with the role on Vero last year. Now that Porter’s involvement is confirmed, however, he went on to explain in the interview how he developed Darkseid’s voice, describing the work as a bit of vocal gymnastics to find the right sound.
“I went through a few different sort of vocal gymnastic things in kind of trying to figure out the voice. … I needed it to be understandable, but it needed to be a voice that was not of this Earth. And that’s what I tried to go for,” Porter explained.
“I can’t wait to hear it either, because also, while I did this voice and everybody was really, really nice about it, I know that in post they probably did stuff to it, and I can’t wait to hear that,” he added. “Plus, the voice that I did, it wouldn’t be something that I could really project. It’s hard, hard on the vocal cords.”
It’s that bit about possible tweaking of the Darkseid voice in post that is worth noting as Porter may have revealed at least an iteration of his Darkseid sound last year. Fans campaigning for the release of the Snyder Cut last summer teamed up with Porter for a campaign to raise money for suicide prevention and, in a brief video teaser, Porter employed a deep, menacing voice. It was a voice that some fans believed may have been at least a version of Darkseid’s voice.
Whatever the final voice ends up sounding like, it will be interesting to see and hear how Darkseid factors into the film. Though the character was removed entirely from the theatrical release, the Fourth World villain has always been a part of Snyder’s plan for Justice League with Snyder himself explaining that Darkseid initially killed Lois Lane (Amy Adams) in his original DCEU plans, setting up the Knightmare sequence from Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
“The truth is that the ‘Knightmare Sequence’ in this movie, it was my idea that all of that would eventually be explained – is that a surprise? And that we would end up in the distant future where Darkseid has taken over Earth, and where Superman has succumbed to the Anti-Life [Equation],” Snyder said about the tease last year. “And there were a few members of the Justice League that survived to that world, and that they were fighting, Batman and a broken half of Cyborg – there’s only half of him because of whatever happened – they were working on an equation to jump back to tell Bruce… those were the things that we were dealing with. And the studio, they were still sort of into the big look, but the deep depth about how and why everyone was mad at each other…”
HBO Max launches later this month and Zack Snyder’s Justice League is due out on the streamer sometime next year.
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