Jimmy Olsen, a recurring character in the Superman comics made a secret appearance in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Olsen is known as a young photojournalist working for the Daily Planet and a close friend of Superman.
**Spoilers**
The character appears early on in the movie, but he’s not identified by name. Olsen is the photographer who accompanies Lois Lane (Amy Adams) to Africa. When the mission goes awry, Olsen is outed as a CIA plant and killed in front of Lane.
Snyder explained the decision to kill-off the character in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “We just did it as this little aside because we had been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go, and we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”
Snyder later admitted that he was originally thinking of casting Jesse Eisenberg as Olsen, but after meeting with him decided on offer him the role of Lex Luthor instead.
“I said, ‘I want to do this misdirect and you’d be great. You’d be a great Jimmy Olsen,’” the director said. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool,’ and he was being very Jesse in the meeting. Introverted but constantly going, ‘Okay, I see, uh-huh. So it’s sort of a pop-culture redirect, you’re gonna do, because of the certain status of an actor…’”
Snyder watched as Eisenberg processed the news out loud and almost immediately started thinking of withdrawing the Jimmy Olsen offer. After the meeting, Snyder turned to his wife, producer Deborah Synder: “I was like, ‘Wow, that guy is crazy… Debbie, what about Jesse as Lex?”
“He met me for, yes, something else,” said Eisenberg to EW. “And I wasn’t really interested in it. But his enthusiasm about the movie and his description of the movie sounded really interesting. … When they sent me the script they asked me to play the part I play in the movie and it was such a wonderfully drawn character.”
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opened in theaters March 25.
