'Batman v Superman' Villain Comes Back from the Dead

Michael Shannon cleared up some weird "Batman v Superman" rumors.

The Batman v Superman rumors just keep getting weirder. Earlier this month Michael Shannon, who plays villain General Zod in the upcoming flick, let slip a crazy story about getting stuck in a port-a-potty on set because he had flippers on his hands and couldn't open the door. Yesterday, Shannon cleared things up with The Daily Beast — apparently he made that story up on the spot. And the whole flippers-for-hands thing? Also bullshit. 

In fact, even though he's in the trailer, Shannon is barely in Batman v Superman at all: "It’s a really awkward situation—I’m in the trailer for a movie that I didn’t work on," he admitted. But he did a fair share of voiceover work, which is almost equally as revealing. Zod dies when Superman snaps his neck in Man of Steel, and we see him in the Batman v Supermantrailer looking as dead as ever, but apparently in the Krypton universe, dead doesn't always mean dead. 

"The thing about the whole Krypton universe, apparently, is that even when you destroy them, there are ghosts," Shannon said. "The first [film], Jor-El is there even though he’s been dead for lord knows how long."

So the whole flipper-hand thing is fake, and so are the crazy rumors about Lex Luther experimenting on Zod's corpse, thereby somehow creating supervillain Doomsday. But we do know that Zod has a role to play, and that in the upcoming film dead people don't always stay dead. Let the speculation begin. 

For his part, Shannon doesn't seem to feel guilty for making up the port-a-potty flipper-hands story and driving fans crazy: 

"I made up some ridiculous bullshit answer about how my character Zod has flippers, and this went viral on the Internet..." Shannon said with a baffled smile. "That is so obviously a complete bullshit story, right? But people took it seriously."

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