QUESTION:
Do you hold actors in any higher esteem when they are able to perfectly portray an accent foreign to their own?

ANDREA ROMANO:
I admire anyone who is a dialectician in addition to acting. Doing dialects is very technical, while the acting is more organic, so when they can marry those two things convincingly, it’s golden. What I find more often is that British actors can do a spot-on American accent – I think that’s often because they come to America to find work and there’s lots of casting to be done for American characters, so they’re just smart to do it. And it’s not that easy to do an American accent because there are so many regional versions – the deep south, the northeastern variations, even Southern California. They each have their own twists. Greg Ellis can do just about any accent you throw at him. Robin Atkin Downes is just amazing. Jason Isaacs does some stunning accent work – he perfected a Rhode Island accent for Brotherhood.  Miriam Margolyes is another brilliant dialectician – I adore her accents.

QUESTION:
At one point in the LaPaglia session, he wasn’t understanding your direction no matter how many different ways you worded it – and Brcue Timm was able to communicate your direction with a simple drawing of Lex’s face. Has Bruce done that previously/often over your 20-plus years working together?

ANDREA ROMANO:
When Bruce did that for Anthony, I thought that was one of those great moments where a picture is actually worth ten thousand words. One of the things Bruce has done a million times before is, when someone comes in to play a role, he’ll draw the character right there on the spot. That almost always helps an actor establish a voice.

QUESTION:
What’s the most unconventional casting of a villain you’ve ever done?

ANDREA ROMANO:
Bill Macy as a villain in Batman Beyond. I thought I’d do it just to let him be the bad guy, because at the time he was getting all the hapless, milquetoast, endearing good guy roles. So I thought it would be fun to switch it around and, of course, he was brilliant.

QUESTION:
This film has a lot of smaller that make an impact, and you spared no expense in bringing in some lofty talent like  Matthew Gray Gubler as Jimmy Olsen, Frances Conroy as Ma Kent, Ed Asner as Perry White and even cult favorite Alexis Denisof as Dr. Quintum. What was your thinking behind some of those casting choices?

ANDREA ROMANO:
I think Matthew is such a talent. He just did an episode of Criminal Minds where his character was suffering a migraine throughout the entire episode, and he was so good that you actually felt his headache. What I love about Matthew’s voice is that it’s got a naturally youthful quality, and there’s something interesting he does naturally where he almost ends every sentence with a question mark. It’s a very specific speech pattern. His sentences tend to go up at the end. He’s a perfect Jimmy Olsen – sweet, endearing, slightly nerdy. If I had a role for him in every project, I would always hire him.

Frances Conroy – first, let me say that she is not related to Kevin Conroy, which is kind of funny because they know each other very well, and they even went to Juilliard together. I’ve admired her work on everything from Six Feet Under to Maid in Manhattan, and when I heard she was doing voiceovers, I was so jealous somebody else got her before I did. While there weren’t many lines for Ma Kent, it’s always a pivotal role – it’s the woman who helped shape Superman’s sense of right and wrong. And Frances just has that quality about her voice that is mothering and warm and thoughtful, and what she did with such few lines of dialogue was wonderful and exactly what I was hoping to get.

Alexis has such an interesting quality to his voice. I loved Dr. Quintum, he’s such an odd character, and the voice matches perfectly. I’m never 100 percent sure when doing the casting if I made the right decision. It’s not until it comes back in animation that we really know that it actually did work. Alexis as Dr. Quintum is definitely one of those circumstances that worked well.

QUESTION:
Beyond the on-camera actors, you tend to appear to have the best times directing when you have a room full of full-time voiceover actors – like on this project with John DiMaggio, Kevin Michael Richardson, Robin Atkin Downes, Steve Blum, Fred Tatasciore, Michael Gough and so on. What’s that group session like?

ANDREA ROMANO:
Often when I cast my ensemble players for some of the secondary characters, and that is to say secondary characters by the number of lines they must perform, I treat it almost like a casting party. I want to put together people who enjoy being in a room together, that are going to bring something to the party, and that they’re somebody with whom I want to spend a few hours locked in a room together. Okay, sometimes it should be a padded room. I find that I get a core group of actors and I almost want to carry them with me to every different project I’m working on – the end credits of my films and series probably back that up. When I get the chance, I also like to cast those guys in major featured roles, like John DiMaggio as the Joker in Batman: Under the Red Hood. The thing about these actors is that they’re so versatile that I could assign three roles to each before they walked into the room, and I could change it when we walked into the room and they’d have no problem playing the other characters instead. It’s always fun to work with that group, but sometimes it is like being a kindergarten teacher with an over-crowded class.