As promised, Peacemaker Episode 6 featured a BIG cameo from an actor from Superman. And not only that, but the scene featuring — spoilers past this point — Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor was originally supposed to debut next week, in Episode 7, according to writer/director James Gunn.
“That scene with Lex Luthor was originally gonna appear in episode seven,” Gunn revealed on the official podcast for the episode. “That is the other thing that I moved besides the openings of two and four, which I switched around. And the reason being that the next scene was so serious and heavy that I needed an in-between scene. And luckily I had shot both of them, so it wasn’t a weird directing thing for me to just steal a scene from the next episode.”
In the scene, which Gunn calls “an important moment not just for Peacemaker, but the entire DCU,” Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) shows up to strike a deal with Lex in order to find out where Peacemaker’s (John Cena) portal to another dimension is. In exchange, Flag agrees to “move him from a prison with metahumans to a prison with no metahumans, from Belle Reve to Van Kull, both prisons from the comics.”
As it turns out, this scene was almost entirely separate from Peacemaker, at least in terms of production.
“This was one of the first scenes we shot,” Gunn explained. “We shot it in the middle of Superman, while we were shooting the Pentagon sequences in Superman. And it was cool, it was weird, because tonally, it instantly felt different from Superman, which is so big and brash, and then this show is, like, so strangely grounded and gritty. And then also hearing Nick curse.”
Noting that he felt like Hoult’s performance was different on Peacemaker than in Superman, even beyond the saltier language, Jennifer Holland, who plays Emilia Harcourt on the show, agreed.
“It felt a little darker, yeah,” Holland added. “It was a little different.”
But not only is the scene a cameo from Superman… It’s also (sort of) a cameo from The Suicide Squad: the prison set used for Lex and Flag’s heart-to-heart is the Belle Reve set from Gunn’s previous DC movie.
“We had built it on stage, and then we brought it over,” explained Lars Winther, an assistant director for Peacemaker. “And then, of course, we’re in this massive warehouse, and I tell them, ‘just put it in a corner,’ and hey put it right in the middle, right under the loud air conditioning vent… And the sound guy was a day player, he was like, ‘Well, we can’t shoot this scene today.’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s not going to happen’ … It was a bit of a cluster at the beginning of the day, but then we sorted it out.”
While Winther magnanimously added that it wasn’t the Superman crew and it wasn’t the Peacemaker crew that shot the scene, but instead, “a random crew, great crew,” Gunn was a little harsher.
“But the sound was terrible, and the sound in post, they had to work out a lot of problems,” Gunn said. “I mean, there was a lot of problems with the sound.”
So everything seems to have worked against this scene — but at the end of the day, there it is on screen, in all its Lex Luthor glory.
Peacemaker Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
Peacemaker season 2 premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, August 21. The season will be eight episodes long, with one episode premiering per week.
Here’s the full list of episodes in Peacemaker Season 2, with premiere dates:
- Thursday, August 21, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 1
- Thursday, August 28, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 2
- Thursday, September 4, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 3
- Thursday, September 11, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 4
- Thursday, September 18, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 5
- Thursday, September 25, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 6
- Thursday, October 2, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 7
- Thursday, October 9, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
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