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  1. Entertainment
  2. Movies

Justice League actor explains the villain Steppenwolf's conflicted motivation

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By Ben Pearson published 6 April 2017

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We’ve known for a while that actor Ciaran Hinds (Harry Potter, Game of Thrones) will play the villainous Steppenwolf in Justice League, but since that character only appeared in a deleted scene from Batman v Superman, his motivations are still a little murky.

Hinds recently spoke with The Independent and cleared things up a bit. In addition to revealing that his motion capture performance required him to wear a suit that was “very tight and embarrassing,” the actor revealed that Steppenwolf’s villainous behavior has some complicated roots. “He’s old, tired, still trying to get out of his own enslavement to Darkseid, [but] he has to keep on this line to try and take over worlds.”

If Steppenwolf is just a puppet of Darkseid (the DC Universe’s ultimate big bad, equivalent to Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), I wonder if we’ll find ourselves rooting for him by the end of this new movie. It doesn’t sound like he necessarily wants to take over worlds, he’s just following orders from a hidden mastermind who is sure to become a bigger bad guy in a later film. Either way, with his loads of experience in high quality movies and geek-friendly properties, Hinds should be able to bring plenty of gravitas to his motion-captured baddie.

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Directed by Zack Snyder and starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, J.K. Simmons, Willem Dafoe, Amber Heard, Ciaran Hinds, Ezra Miller, and Ray Fisher, Justice League is currently scheduled for a November 17, 2017 release.

Image: Warner Bros.

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Ben Pearson
Ben Pearson
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Ben is an entertainment journalist who has written about movies online for nearly a decade. He loves the Fast & Furious franchise, prefers Indiana Jones to Star Wars, and will defend the ending of Lost until his dying day. He shook Bill Murray's hand once (so he's got that going for him, which is nice). Ben lives in Los Angeles with his wife.
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