The Flash’s Michael Shannon turned down a Star Wars role so he wouldn’t get “stuck in a franchise”

Michael Shannon is just setting everybody up this week with some comments about big-budget franchise movies that are practically begging to be unfairly picked at and criticized—though the only reason it seems unfair is that Shannon is a good actor who has done interesting things, and he seems like a nice guy on top of that. If this were anyone but Shannon, we would all cheer as the internet ripped them apart.

Anyway, this comes from a recent print interview with Empire (via Entertainment Weekly), where Shannon was asked about his decision to turn down a mysterious role in a Star Wars movie in 2016. Shannon explained that he’s always “a bit wary about those giant movies” because they take a long time to make and he doesn’t think they’re “very simulating to work on.” He says he doesn’t want to “get stuck in a franchise” like Star Wars because he doesn’t think they’re “interesting” and doesn’t want to “perpetuate them.”

He then went even harder, saying that he wants there to be “some kind of purpose to it” if he’s making something so it doesn’t just end up as “mindless entertainment.” He says “the world doesn’t need more mindless entertainment. We’re inundated with it.”

Of course—and we’re really sorry to do this—Michael Shannon can currently be seen in The Flash (a movie that seems like exactly the sort of thing he’s describing) and he’s reprising his role as General Zod from Man Of Steel in it (which means it seems like he’s doing the exact thing he didn’t want to do). Not to imply that Shannon is some kind of hypocrite, because he did tell Collider pretty recently that he really thought Man Of Steel was kind of an “in-depth character study” for Zod (say what you will about Zack Snyder, but the people who work with him generally have positive things to say) and one of the reasons he signed on was because he thought at the time that it would be a “one-and-done” appearance.

Not that anyone forced him to be in The Flash, but he told Empire that it only required “a couple of weeks” of work (“so it didn’t break my back to do it”) and then he was done. And who knows how much he got paid or if he did it as a favor to any of his old Man Of Steel buddies. Basically, as fun as it is to say “this guy who reprised his Man Of Steel role for The Flash thinks tentpole movies are dumb,” it seems like The Flash is the exception that proves the rule for him. In other words, don’t count on him to show up in Flash 2—though a Flash sequel alone seems so unlikely that any number of completely unthinkable things could happen in it.