He might be directing Superman: Legacy, the next movie to capture the Man of Steel’s fight for truth, justice, and the American way, but James Gunn is fighting his own battle against trolls, injustice, and the Twitter way on social media. In his latest one-man stand against the haters, the DC chief has hit back against claims that he’s casting his wife Jennifer Holland all over the place now that he’s steering the ship.
As per Gunn, Holland’s recurring cameos as Emilia Harcourt in various DCU projects, beginning with The Suicide Squad and then followed by Peacemaker and Black Adam, are nothing to do with him using his sway as producer as they all happened before his era as DC Studios co-CEO began. That’s a fair response, but in a Reddit thread unpacking his comments, fans started to wonder why he was even having to field this question in the first place. Which led to some having to come to terms with an unfortunate fact.
As one innocent responder pointed out, Gunn’s been casting his brother, Sean Gunn, in his movies for years and no one’s ever had a problem with that.
Could there be some ancient societal evil that’s causing fans to have problems with Gunn casting his wife over his brother? Hmm…
Sean Gunn has worked with his director sibling on all of his Marvel and DC films to date — not only that, but he has dual roles too (as Rocket’s Mo-Cap performer and Kraglin in Guardians of the Galaxy and Weasel/Calendar Man in The Suicide Squad). But “fans” have never had an issue with that.
Others literally could not care less about Gunn’s nepo casting accusations as both actors are clearly the best choices for their roles.
The real question for some, though, isn’t why is Gunn getting all this hate for casting his wife, but rather why is he bothering to answer the trolls at all?
With James Gunn’s DCU era just beginning, and with him seemingly committed to remaining on Twitter, it looks like he’ll be heroically fighting this (incredibly dumb) fight for a long time to come.