Superman & Lois Casts The Walking Dead Veteran as Lex Luthor

Michael Cudlitz, the veteran character actor best known for his role as Abraham on The Walking Dead, has joined the DC multiverse. Cudlitz will play Lex Luthor in the upcoming third season of Superman & Lois, stepping in to give the show’s new Earth a Lex of its very own. The CW previously had Jon Cryer playing the role of Lex on Supergirl and in the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event. When a casting call went out recently for the character, Cryer confirmed that nobody had approached him to continue on in the role. Last season, Superman & Lois surprised fans with the revelation that it does not take place on the same Earth as The Flash and Supergirl.

According to the official character description (via EW, who first reported the casting), Superman & Lois‘s take on Lex is “known to the world as the visionary billionaire behind LexCorp, but secretly, the criminal underworld knows who Lex truly is: a brutal psychopath who terrorizes anyone he crosses paths with. When Lex debuts this season, it’s been years since he dropped out of the public eye and he’s re-emerging hellbent on correcting a personal injustice by enacting revenge on the two people he feels have wronged him – Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois Lane (Elizabeth Tulloch).”

In addition to years on The Walking Dead and the awards-bait miniseries Band of Brothers for HBO, Cudlitz also starred on TNT’s Southland, which earned him a Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama. He joins a cast that recently added Michael Bishop as Jonathan Kent, a role previously played by Jordan Elsass. Elsass shocked fans last year by quitting the show, reportedly due to creative differences.

Superman & Lois faced off with a TV-friendly version of The Eradicator in  its first season. Instead of being a Kryptonian weapon sprung to life, the character was reinvented as Superman’s previously-unknown half-brother, who hid out on Earth until he figured out a way to try to take over the world. In the second season, a cult leader who had been the subject of a Lois Lane expose transformed herself into a version of the comics villain The Parasite, and tried to combine Earth with Bizarro World. In addition to Luthor, it is assumed that this season of the show will include Intergang, whose leader Bruno Manheim was name-dropped in the season two finale.

The third season of Superman & Lois debuts in February on The CW.