In Joe Manganiello’s office sits a Deathstroke helmet, and he looks at it every single day. The reason it means so much to him has less to do with comic book films than with his time in a hospital bed.
Manganiello made a brief appearance as Deathstroke at the end of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and was set to return as the lead villain in Ben Affleck’s solo Batman project. That film never got made. Now the actor has talked openly about how losing it affected him, and his account is far heavier than the typical “bummer, that one fell through” interview.
A part that gave him something to fight for
Manganiello was battling an autoimmune disease when he was offered the Batman role. His weight had fallen from 235 pounds to 176. According to the actor, Deathstroke became the thing that drove him forward and pushed him to get fully healthy again.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Manganiello said: “I just knew I needed to fight. I needed to get in better shape, I needed to gain the weight back that I had lost in the hospital.”
The project was reportedly an ambitious one that aimed to pull together 80 years of Batman mythos. Affleck was set to star as the Caped Crusader opposite Manganiello, and he had initially been attached to write and direct as well. He later stepped away from the director’s chair. The film was eventually scrapped, and Snyder’s DCEU wound down after Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom arrived in 2023. Manganiello’s Deathstroke went down along with it.
Seeing the scars for the first time
Manganiello is blunt about how badly the news hit him.
“I lost my mind when that happened,” he said about the Batman cancellation. “It was so tough. Because I took me being offered that role as the villain of Batman as the universe saying it’s gonna be okay. And when it went away, I didn’t have that to fight for anymore. And it was almost like, I now looked in the mirror, and for the first time since getting sick and having surgery, I saw the scars and I realized this didn’t happen to someone else,” he explained, then finished the thought: “this happened to you.”
What stands out most, though, is how he views it today. At some point he came to see the whole experience in a completely different light.
“At the time I saw it as being unlucky. What I came to understand through the full journey was that I was lucky to get it. It was never meant to be for me. It was there to make sure I didn’t stop fighting, and that I was in the best shape possible for when they tried to reconnect my digestive system.”
He has since accepted the loss of the role and recovered from his health issues. Even so, he isn’t ready to give up on Deathstroke. When asked whether he would still want to play the character, Manganiello made no attempt to hide his enthusiasm.
“You know, I have that helmet from when I got to play him for the first time sitting in my office and I look at it every day, and it’s the greatest achievement of my life,” he said. “I’ve been to hell and back. You want a warrior? You know who to call.”
How Affleck tells it
Affleck has also addressed the end of his Batman film. Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said his time on Justice League put him off directing a DC universe movie.
“The truth is, the experience of Justice League was so, so negative for lots of different reasons,” Affleck said. “Some of which having to do with where I was personally, some of which having to do with the tragedy that happened during the time, and also the fact that I really saw how not to make a movie like that when the studio is at odds with the filmmaker. You’re really making a mistake. That was what really doomed that.”
Gotham, meanwhile, has carried on without either of them. The Batman Part 2 is in production, with Robert Pattinson and Matt Reeves reuniting to continue the story of a young Batman figuring out where his moral line sits. The production had been shooting for a few months when filming was recently paused after Reeves stepped away for personal reasons. The sequel is set to arrive in early 2028.
For Manganiello, none of this changes much. The film he was meant to make no longer exists. But the helmet still sits on the shelf in his office, and he still looks at it every day.