One Of Superman’s Actors Came Up With A ‘Secret Relationship’ Their Character Has With Lex Luthor, And I Hope This Becomes Canon

María Gabriela de Faría's Engineer with her hand raised forward on Superman poster
(Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

While it remains to be seen when The Authority will be released on the upcoming DC movies schedule since it’s currently on the back burner, we’re only about a month away from meeting one of the team’s members. María Gabriela de Faría is starring in James Gunn’s Superman as Angela Spica, a.k.a. The Engineer, who’s working for Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor. However, if de Faría has her way, Angela and Luthor would be something so much more, and I’m hoping her wish becomes canon in the DC Universe.

María Gabriela de Faría stopped by the latest episode of the DC Studios Showcase podcast (which also included her co-star Edi Gathegi explaining how playing Mr. Terrific gave him a “redemption arc”) to discuss her role as The Engineer in the 2025 movie release. After the actress went over the details of Angela’s dynamic with Lex Luthor, namely that she’s a “good person at heart” who’s ”extremely broken” and decides to help him out with his mission to rid Earth of “evil aliens” like Superman, she had this to say:

But then I also think that they have a secret relationship, and I kept telling James [Gunn], like, ‘I feel like they fuck!’ Lex is so serious, and he has this gorgeous girlfriend that he treats terribly. So I’m like, what if, after hours, The Engineer gets really mean with Lex and he loves it.

The girlfriend de Faría is referring to is Sara Sampaio’s Eve Teschmacher, who was previously played by Valerie Perrine in the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Andrea Brooks in the Supergirl TV series. From what little we’ve seen of Sampaio’s Eve in previews and marketing, she seems obsessed with her looks and taking selfies, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she has a side gig going as an influencer while working as Lex Luthor’s assistant. That, of course, doesn’t excuse him mistreating her.

Strangely though, I see María Gabriela de Faría’s point about how it’d make sense for Angela Spica and Lex Luthor to have an affair going. That’s not to say this dom/sub the Deadly Class alum envisioned wouldn’t be weird, but at least it’d also be entertaining. It doesn’t sound like we’ll get any nod to this in Superman, but if Engineer and Luthor are paired together again in another project, I’m crossing my fingers that James Gunn, who’s also co-president of DC Studios, makes this sexually-charged element of their relationship part of the DCU’s official continuity.

The Engineer and Lex Luthor getting all kinds of freaky will have to be left up to the imagination for now, but we’ll get to see the former’s nanotech abilities on display when Superman hits theaters on July 11. Her visually-dazzling enhancements will make her a formidable threat not just to David Corenswet’s Man of Steel, but also Krypto the Superdog and the robots in the Fortress of Solitude, as seen in the most recent Superman trailer.

Adam Holmes
Senior Content Producer

Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.

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