Warning: SPOILERS for the Titans episode “Game Over” are ahead!
In the Titans Season 4 premiere, Conner Kent, a.k.a. Superboy, was given the opportunity to meet one of his biological fathers, Superman. Unfortunately, the Man of Steel couldn’t make it due to an emergency in another galaxy, but then Conner’s other biological father, Titus Welliver’s Lex Luthor, arranged his own meeting. Well, in another unfortunate twist of fate, Conner watched Luthor die a pretty gruesome death, and thanks to the machinations caused by Mother Mayhem and Brother Blood, Joshua Orpin’s character has been getting into “uncomfortable” territory exploring his Luthor side. The actor talked about the “fun” of playing Superboy this way, along with getting to yell at Dick Grayson and rehearsing some key moments with Welliver.
During my chat with Joshua Orpin ahead of “Game Over” premiering to HBO Max subscribers this week, he started off by talking about how in the prior two Titans seasons, Conner had “been this one kind of character,” but we had seen “glimpses here and there of those Lex Luthor-ish tendencies.” Then Season 4 came along and gave him the opportunity to “eally dive just headfirst into this Lex Luthor persona,” which is something he had a lot of fun with because it allowed him to do “something different with the role” and provided him “this great dialogue.” Orpin continued:
I get to really throw it in Dick Grayson’s face in this scene and I get to say all the things I’ve been thinking that I never articulated before,’ and I really relished that opportunity. That was a lot of fun on set to play around with. I might have even frustrated the writers with some of my extensive improvisation on set. I noticed that not much of it made it into the final cut, especially Episode 6 of Season 4. There was a scene with Dick that comes to mind where we’re standing across the table from one another, and some of those takes I just went off, and I was just saying all these horrible things that were coming to mind. It’s like Conner gives himself permission to say these things that hitherto he’s just repressed. That’s always a lot of fun.
Brenton Thwaites’ Dick Grayson has been leading the Titans throughout the entirety of their show, be it as Robin or Nightwing, and for most of that time, Conner was accepting of his leadership. However, following his various misfortunes throughout Season 4, including being possessed by one of Mother Mayhem’s supernatural serpents, he decided to shave his head and turn to his darker side to pursue his vendetta against Mother Mayhem. That included giving Dick some grief, then promptly leaving the team to start running LexCorp and forge an alliance with Mercy Graves. It’s not exactly standard superhero behavior, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Although Titus Welliver only appeared in the one Titans episode, I was curious about if Joshua Orpin had learned about the path Superboy would venture down early on enough that he might have gotten any Lex Luthor pointers from the Bosch lead. He started off by saying:
Well, it was actually really great because that scene that we had, the Conner and Lex scene that concludes the first episode of Season 4, we actually put some time aside to rehearse that scene. In the world of TV, you may not know, it’s rarer than I would like getting to come in and rehearse scenes, but because it was a big, chunky scene, we got to sit in those feelings. I don’t remember how long it actually turned out in the edit; it’s quite a long scene. We got to come in previously, and Nick Copus, our director, put aside some time, and Titus and I went onto the set and we rehearsed. We had all these discussions and we spoke about the characters and how they felt about one another. We blocked the whole scene out. Yeah, those discussions were had.
Titus Welliver may have looked glorious as a bearded Lex Luthor, but even if Mother Mayhem’s magic hadn’t done him in, he was still dying from kryptonite poisoning. So either way, Conner didn’t have long to be with his “dad,” but their short time together left an imprint on him, and the same went for Joshua Orpin working with Welliver. Having said that, Orpin said that by that point in the course of shooting Titans Season 4, he had no idea about Superboy channeling his inner Luthor, meaning he didn’t talk with Welliver about giving a similar kind of performance. In his words:
I don’t think that Titus really gave me any pointers on how to be more Lex-ish, because at that point in the story, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t know where this was going to take Conner. So it wasn’t until later that I realized that we were really going into that whole Lex Luthor side of Conner. Regardless, it was a joy to watch him work, and all of those elements that he was bringing to the character, I made an effort to observe and in my own way pull from, or in some cases even mimic some of the things he was doing later on. Especially in Episode 10, we get to see Conner really try to step into those shoes and we get to see Conner’s interpretation of Lex. So I feel those elements I try to bring into play.
During “Game Over,” Conner recruited Sebastian Sanger/Brother Blood to LexCorp to launch his game Abraxus in order to get him away from Mother Mayhem. The launch was successful, but Sebastian augmented the game with his magic so that he could drain the players’ life forces to enhance himself. Not willing to let innocents die, Conner secretly opened a backdoor into LexCorp’s security mainframe so that Tim Drake could shut down Abraxus. So while Conner has been behaving more aggressively, fans at least know he hasn’t gone full baddie like Lex Luthor did.
Titans and Doom Patrol are both ending with their current seasons, so there are now just two episodes left of the former show to look forward to on HBO Max. The good news, though, is that there’s still a handful of goodies to look forward to in this final stretch, including Tim Drake becoming the new Robin. But if you’d rather look further ahead to the future, scan through the lineup of upcoming DC TV shows.
