Tim Blake Nelson, a longtime character actor who has featured in Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk and Captain America: Brave New World, is drawing on his Hollywood experience as inspiration for a new novel.
Nelson, who’s also a playwright, screenwriter, and director, will launch his second novel, Superhero, on Dec. 2, and Entertainment Weekly has an exclusive first look at the cover. Pre-orders are available through Unnamed Press.
The story follows A-list actor Peter Compton and producing partner Marci Levy, a married power couple who “exist in the rarefied air of Hollywood’s elite,” according to the summary. When they’re tapped to make a tentpole superhero movie based on Major Machina from the fictional Sparta comics, with Peter in the leading role, tensions and egos run amok behind the scenes.
In an interview with EW, Nelson says he wanted to create “a current tragic hero.”
The Unnamed Press
“I think that movies and the making of movies, in so many respects, are a microcosm for the way that cultural and societal and political and ideological forces work in America,” he says. “So I wanted to use the lens of that as a kind of refraction and magnification of bigger cultural forces. I think that the ascent of the superhero movie is a cultural phenomenon in so many ways, projected deeper forces and interests in American society as a whole. There’s a reason that these movies came into being with such force in the beginning of the 21st century, and that’s a combination of what the public wanted to see and what the movie industry itself was perceiving in the zeitgeist.”
Those who continue to follow Nelson’s work will likely see parallels between the subject matter and his career experience playing Samuel Sterns, a.k.a. the Leader, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He also played Mole Man in 2015’s Fantastic Four, which was plagued by real-life production drama. Those parallels are not entirely unwarranted.
“I wanted to write a deeply honest book, and in pursuit of that, much of what happens in the book is stuff that I experienced — some of it as a director and some of it as an actor, much of it stories I’ve heard from other people,” Nelson explains. “So I would not, as tempting as it might be, necessarily call this a satire because there’s very little that goes on in the book that doesn’t reflect real experiences I’ve had or people close to me have had. So absolutely, this book, while it’s not a roman à clef in any sense of the word, is nevertheless based on real experiences.”
Michael Gibson/Universal
His previous book, also a fictional story called City of Blows, was similarly inspired by behind-the-scenes drama from the movie business. Nelson relays how his wife felt that the novel encapsulated “much of what is wrong and demented about the movie industry,” while Superhero now captures “how even at its most ridiculous, a movie set can be a real blast.”
“I love working on these movies,” Nelson clarifies. “I very much admire these movies. In particular with the MCU, what Marvel has accomplished is kind of unprecedented, with these dozens of interrelated stories, with cast members jumping in and out of each other’s narratives, and with creating this enormous compendium of different movies that each have a unique rhythm and feel and identity, but they also all cohere as a whole. What I wanted to do in Superhero is look at it from all sides. It’s not a polemical novel either in favor of or against these big franchise movies.”
Nelson first got the idea for Superhero while filming Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities, for which he played Nick Appleton, a xenophobic, right-wing veteran who has a run-in with a demon. Guillermo Navarro, the director of that episode, titled “Lot 36,” shared an experience he had in the industry with Nelson that became a passage in the upcoming book. “That really inspired me,” Nelson says, but notes, “I can’t tell you what it is.”
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The writing of the novel then conveniently aligned with Nelson’s casting in Captain America: Brave New World, for which he returned to his Marvel role of Samuel Sterns for the first time in about 17 years.
“Which ended up being a really great part to get to play, but also exposing to me for the third time aspects of the MCU as it has continued to grow,” Nelson comments. “Not that Superhero is about the MCU, because it isn’t. It’s informed by the MCU, but it’s about blockbuster movies. And, yes, I’ve taken some stuff from the MCU, some from DC, some from other big action franchise movies I’ve done. I’ve been lucky enough to be in several different franchises, but it was a real boon to get to be writing this and engage with a new set of practitioners and some of the old ones who I’d known from previous films.”
Amanda Seyfried, who will star in The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, the upcoming film also starring and directed by Nelson, shares praise for Superhero. “This is a uniquely nuanced and engaging perspective on the oddness of Hollywood…Superhero goes inside baseball in all the best ways: unbiased, at times ridiculous, and wonderfully, uncomfortably accurate,” she says in a statement. “It begs to be read because it is so damned good.”
