When Jena Malone was first spotted by superfans on the set of “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” speculation about her then mysterious role was feverish. Was she playing Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl? Robin? Well, as we finally learned with the release of the Zack Snyder‘s extended cut of ‘Batman v Superman,’ the answer was much more benign.
Malone wound up playing Jenet Klyburn, a fairly minor character in the DC Comics universe. She’s the lead scientist at STAR Labs, and Malone’s screentime amounts to a couple of minutes. It’s pretty easy to see why Snyder snipped it from the theatrical version of the movie. But Malone has no hard feelings about it, and in fact, learned a valuable lesson about fandom spinning out of control.
“I had some scenes. It wasn’t — for me, the beauty of working with friends is that someone can call you up and be like, ‘I’d love for you to come and do this part for two days.’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah. Awesome.’ It negates all of the bullshit of auditioning and going between agents and all this other stuff and Zack Snyder and I really love working together and get along and have very similar work ethics,” she told AV Club about her “Sucker Punch” director. “So when he was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a little something for you,’ I was like, ‘Awesome.’ I didn’t really think much of it, nor did I expect anything of it. It was just one of those great, you know—two blocks away is a baker and here I am as a grain farmer. Cool, I’ll be over on Monday. We can make a loaf of bread. No big deal.”
“But for me, the funniest thing that I learned about that is you don’t have to be in a movie to let everyone think you’re in a movie. I learned a really interesting lesson in the sense of false PR — by me being just on set of that, there were all these swirling rumors that I was Robin,” she continued. “And I was like, wow, this is actually a really interesting technique to get a job — to pretend you have it. It was definitely a lesson in public relations that I hadn’t fully engaged with that I would love to reinterpret in maybe a political anarchist type of way. It’s cool.”
Certainly, Malone got a small taste of what the media and fanboy maelstrom is like by just briefly dipping her toes in the world of ‘Batman v Superman.’ Even without being in the theatrical version, the experience was a bit surreal.
In case you haven’t sat down with Extended Cut of ‘Batman v Superman,’ here are all of Malone’s scenes: