When Justice League was shooting in London, Ben Affleck Tweeted out test footage of Deathstroke, confirming that the villain would face the Caped Crusader in The Batman. The movie's post-credits scene - which was partially reshot by Joss Whedon - saw Joe Manganiello revealed as Slade Wilson, and the actor was recently given the chance to reprise the role in the Snyder Cut.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor opened up on learning that The Batman had been cancelled by Warner Bros. "Probably the worst phone call I’ve ever received was when The Batman wasn’t happening. Then there were about seven other phone calls that followed up that one involving other Deathstroke projects that weren’t happening, so those were tough."
Manganiello went on to talk about receiving a call from Zack Snyder about the cut of Justice League coming to HBO Max, and confirms that he used that as a chance to tease Slade's future.
"I was just like, 'Okay, I’m actually going to step back into this armor again, four years later. How can I improve upon it? How can I maybe set the table for some further adventures?'" the actor teases. "So there’s some easter eggs involved with my return, and we definitely snuck some things in this time. There’s a reason for the mohawk."
"I’ve had a lot of time to think about the character and work on the character for these various other incarnations that never happened." As for his future as Deathstroke, Manganiello added: "Well, we’ll see what happens, but yeah, I had four years to think about what I’d do differently or what I really wanted to do. So there’s as much of that as I could squeeze into this appearance."
Talking of bad phone calls, it turns out that landing his role as Flash Thompson in Spider-Man was far from smooth sailing for Manganiello. "I won’t name names, but there was someone who didn’t want me as Flash. So for a month and a half, they went ahead and auditioned everybody else in town all over again. Then, on Christmas Eve, I got a call that I got the role back. Well, no, the way it was phrased to me by my agent at the time was, 'They didn’t find anybody else. The role is yours.'"
That could go some way in explaining why we didn't see any more of Flash in the trilogy, and we can now only hope that Manganiello will get the opportunity to continue playing Deathstroke.