Tonight on Superman & Lois, Lois Lane (Bitsie Tulloch) threw down the gauntlet against Morgan Edge in a way nobody saw coming: she left the Daily Planet and struck out on her own. It’s just the latest in a series of big changes for Lois, from the personal (moving to Smallville) to the global (her son suddenly has super-powers) to the meta (Tulloch has to stap up to lead her own series now, rather than being a guest in other Arrowverse shows). Through it all, she has seemed unflappable, and that’s in part due to Tulloch’s empathetic but rock-solid take on the character.
With her husband out of work and now Lois working for a small newspaper, it’s also going to put a lot of pressure on Clark, Jonathan, and Jordan to get the farm up and running again. After all, Smallville is already a town in an economic crisis, and Martha Kent took out a reverse-mortgage on the house before she died.
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Tulloch recently joined ComicBook to talk about the series, and what leaving the Planet means for her.
You and Tyler have been in these roles for a while, but it’s a different world when you’re the lead of a series, and also when you’re very much digging into like Lois’ personality. How has that shift changed how you view the character?
Well, I think that it’s made me probably have to be a little bit more grounded and a little bit more serious sometimes because the relationship with these kids who are either in danger or they’re having an anxiety attack, or they’re quite frankly being really bratty to one or both of their parents has sort of forced her to be a little bit more serious.
I think of the two of them Lois is slightly warmer and probably a little bit closer to the boys than Clark is just because Clark has been hiding this huge secret and even though they don’t know he’s hiding a secret, there is obviously something deep down that’s like, we don’t know our father, he is this sort of unknown being to us, but otherwise I still try to sort of infuse the character with sass and goofiness and fun. I always have so much fun playing Lois Lane.
You and Tyler are both very young obviously to be playing the parents of teenagers. So how has that been, walking into this thing where you have to build not just an instant family chemistry, but one that goes back fifteen years?
Well I am a mom. I mean, I have a two year old, so it’s a little different.
I’m also older than Tyler. Someone has actually Tweeted me saying that a lot of the Loises have been older than the Clarks, and so they were wondering if my casting was intentional. I don’t think it was, but I think that I certainly brought a lot of my personality to it. Granted it’s different — she’s two — but I do treat my daughter with a lot of respect. I don’t really baby her. I expect her to be polite. I expect her to say, please and thank you and she’s good about all that stuff.
One thing that I tried to really bring to Lois’s dynamic with her sons is mutual respect. Like, “I expect more of you guys, so right now it’s not like I’m pissed at you, I’m just disappointed…and I’m going to tell you I’m disappointed and it’s because I expect you to be better.”
They want to raise good decent humans, because that’s part of what makes Superman, Superman. Superman’s doing the right thing because it’s the right thing. He could use his powers for evil; he’s choosing not to. And so I think for Lois and Clark, it’s really important for them to raise good men who are decent and kind.
All the other Arrowverse shows take place in big cities, and this is not an urban show. Has that been a new challenge — doing superheroes without the iconography of Superman jumping over a skyscraper?
We are going to have that, because he still has to jet off at a moment’s notice to places all over the world. So we’re still going to have these set pieces, and I know that the fans are going to want to see a lot of that. It’s just primarily going to be rooted more on these muted colors.
Smallville, honestly, is a bit of a ghost town and that’s part of why I think it looks so beautiful. We’re shooting wide screen, we’re shooting in a different aspect ratio, but it is going to be the sort of the stereotypical colors you would think of when you were thinking of a farm.
Because I do engage with fans on social media, I have seen some people being like, “I want to see Lois in Metropolis, Lois is a city girl!” I myself am thinking, “I get it. But that’s part of why her storyline’s kind of interesting, because she is a fish out of water in Smallville.
In the pilot, there was a little but of rural-versus-urban political sparring. How steeped in that is Lois going to be when her arch-nemesis is a corporate raider?
I think it’s sort of inevitable. I think that’s how they’ve been setting it up, the way she talks about a living wage, for example.
And you’re talking about something that’s very, very timely, which is that you have this journalist whose newspaper is being taken over by an entrepreneur, and her words are literally being changed and/or redacted, which is part of why she quits.
So, she’s dealing with this arch-nemesis, who’s a zillionaire corporate figure and she’s having to take him on, on her own without the platform or the resources of the Daily Planet which is certainly no small feat. So that’s definitely a big thing that I think they seem to be playing into.
And there’s also the fish out of water aspect, like I alluded to before, which is that Lois is trying to fight for the people of Smallvill, and she assumes that they’re all going to be jumping on board and understand that she has their best interest in mind, but they’re looking at her as an outsider who doesn’t know what they’ve gone through. There’s a sort of a wake-up moment for her to where she’s like, maybe I haven’t really thought this through, maybe the cons of involving this figure are not as big as the pros for them.
You know — recently, we spoke with your husband…
Do you want to hear something weird? David [Giuntoli] voices Batman….So I’m married to Batman and Superman. I’ve been cleaning up.
