You can tell Dwayne Johnson has absorbed some personality traits from his Black Adam character by the way he’s already starting to trash-talk Superman. Black Adam is the nemesis of Shazam in comics lore, but Johnson seems to enjoy picking fights with those who loom even larger. “When you pull Black Adam out of the pantheon of superheroes in the DC Universe, he is blessed with these incredible superpowers from the gods that rival Superman,” the actor says. “The difference is, well, a few things. Number one, Superman’s greatest weakness is magic, and one of Black Adam’s greatest superpowers is magic.”

Black Adam can fly, bullets bounce off his skin, and explosions would merely muss his hair (if he had any). He can rip through stone walls and bend steel. Instead of shooting heat rays from his eyes, he channels lightning blasts from his fists. But unlike Superman, he doesn’t have any soft spots like mercy, empathy, or compassion. 

“Superman won’t kill anybody. There’s a code that he lives by and he honors,” Johnson says. “Black Adam has a unique code of ethics too. He will not hesitate—and I like to have a little fun when I’m explaining this—to rip somebody in half.” Does that mean the actor is…kidding? “Literally, he’ll grab someone by the neck and by the thigh and then rip them up, tear them apart,” Johnson clarifies.

That’s why Black Adam falls more into the category of supervillain than superhero—and why the October 21 movie is a heel-turn for Johnson, who built his global superstardom playing fundamentally decent men who are bulldozer tough but also have a moral core that’s solid as, let’s say, a rock. After starring as good guy after good guy in blockbuster after blockbuster, Johnson says it’s time for fans to see him in a new light. Or maybe light is the wrong word.

It’s okay to have zero idea who Black Adam is. Few outside the hard-core geek sphere do, although the character has been causing havoc in the pages of comic books since 1945. “I did think about that a lot because I didn’t know about Black Adam either,” says Jaume Collet-Serra, the director of the movie. Johnson and producers Hiram Garcia and Beau Flynn first pitched him the project while they were making Jungle Cruise in 2018. 

Collet-Serra says he was interested in leaning into the character’s obscurity, making the movie more of a mystery than a recitation of a familiar origin story. “It’s not your typical superhero movie where a guy wants to be a superhero and gets the powers, and then you spend 50 minutes trying to figure out how the powers work,” the filmmaker says. “This is a movie where you introduce Black Adam right away, and then throughout the movie you slowly peel back the onion and reveal what happened.”

In the actual world, Black Adam first appeared at the end of World War II in the pages of Fawcett Comics, now long defunct. He was always a foe of Captain Marvel’s (although not the Captain Marvel you think), possessing matching powers but using them very differently. Adam was once a mortal from ancient Egypt who was granted his mystical abilities to “fight evil in the world.” Instantly afterward, he became a brutal tyrant. A forced “time-out” from the planet lasted several thousand years, which only enraged him more when he returned. 

Fawcett Comics also took a long hiatus, abandoning superhero storytelling in the early 1950s in part because of a long-running lawsuit that claimed it had repeatedly ripped off Superman stories. In the 1970s, DC officially acquired the rights to Fawcett’s fallow characters, integrating them into the very universe they were once accused of imitating. By then, rival Marvel Comics had created its own Captain Marvel (still not the one you think, but closer), so the new DC version of the character had to be rebranded with the magical catchphrase that activates his powers: Shazam! 

When Warner Bros. began development on a Shazam movie in 2014, Johnson signed on to costar as Black Adam. But when the film starring Zachary Levi was released in 2019, there was no Rock, and almost no Black Adam either. “When the first draft of the movie came to us, it was a combination of Black Adam and Shazam: Two origin stories in one movie,” Johnson recalls. “Now that was the goal—so it wasn’t a complete surprise. But when I read that, I just knew in my gut, ‘We can’t make this movie like this. We would be doing Black Adam an incredible disservice.’ It would’ve been fine for Shazam having two origin stories converge in one movie, but not good for Black Adam.”

Johnson started lobbying for the bad guy to get his own film. “I made a phone call,” Johnson says. “I said, ‘I have to share my thoughts here. It’s very unpopular…’ because everybody thought, ‘Hey, this script is great, let’s go make this movie.’ I said, ‘I really think that you should make Shazam!, make that movie on its own in the tone that you want. And I think we should separate this as well.’”

The 2019 Shazam! movie did include one allusion to Black Adam: The wizard who bestows the powers of the superhero reveals that he once gave the abilities “recklessly” to the wrong person, who used them to unleash vengeance on the world. As he recounts this tale, an illuminated figure who looks a lot like Johnson as Black Adam is shown presiding over the misery.

The stand-alone movie will undoubtedly make Black Adam go mainstream. But for now the filmmaker, producers, and Johnson himself have some work to do, introducing him to the unfamiliar. There’s a voracious appetite for superhero stories—but in an era of reboots of reboots and multiverses uniting three actors who all played the same part once upon a time, audiences have come to believe that most of the great characters have already had at least one moment onscreen. That’s not the case with Black Adam. “I always get asked, nine times out of 10, ‘Well, what’s taken them so long? How come we haven’t heard of this character?’” says Johnson, who sees that as a plus. “We get a chance to deliver a movie, deliver a character, that’s never been seen before. There has been no other Black Adam.”

But who is he? Let’s start with the name. “Black Adam’s real name is Teth-Adam,” Johnson explains. “And the Black in Black Adam refers to his soul.”

“Teth-Adam” was also the name given to the character during his debut in 1945. For the film, Egypt has been replaced as his homeland with the fictional Middle Eastern realm of Kahndaq, as it has been in the comics for years. Otherwise, the origin stories match up. Black Adam’s turn to the dark side will also provide more of a rationale for his mercilessness, if not a justification for it.

It’s all connected to something unspeakable that happened to his family when they were enslaved in that long-ago era. “That’s something that’s universal, that everyone can relate to,” Johnson says. “It doesn’t matter your color, or religion, or what your bank account says, or wherever you live, or what your job is. I mean, everybody can relate to family and wanting to do all you can to protect that family. And when your family’s ripped away from you…it changes the person.”

Comics are full of heroes who lose loved ones to wrongdoers, only to seek solace in saving others from similar fates. Black Adam is just built differently. He’s more aligned with the vengeance-seeking antiheroes of the ’70s, whose brutality start to overtake that of their enemies: Think Charles Bronson in Death Wish, Pam Grier in Foxy Brown, and Meiko Kaji in Lady Snowblood—or one particular cop who simply harbored extreme contempt for punks.

“I talked early on with D.J. about how there were many similar aspects between Black Adam and Dirty Harry, which is a movie that broke rules in the ’70s,” Collet-Serra says. “The systems were corrupt, so you had criminals taking advantage. You needed a cop that would cut through the bullshit, and basically do what needs to be done. That’s very much in line with Black Adam and his way of thinking. I think that’s appealing to pretty much everybody. Everybody knows how the world sometimes is not fair, and you need people that break the rules to even out the playing field.”

The world doesn’t see Black Adam that way—at least, not when he is first awakened and unleashed on the earth as a terrifying, unstoppable supernatural force. To everyone else, he looks like a monster. And he basically is.

“His view of this world that he is brought back into—the current world, now, after 5,000 years—is very myopic,” Johnson says. “There’s no room or space for him being wrong. There’s no room or space for anyone else’s opinion. There’s only room and space for him justifying anything that he does because of his pain. And he pushes and pushes and pushes and does not see any other way. It’s very black and white.”

Eventually, all that pushing will lead him to others who are willing to push back.

The film introduces moviegoers to the Justice Society of America—which is separate from the similar-sounding (and now more widely known) Justice League. The JSA started uniting heroes about two decades before and features the likes of Dr. Fate and Hawkman, who turn up in Black Adam, played by Pierce Brosnan and Aldis Hodge.

In the comics, Hawkman flies with wings forged from extraterrestrial metal. He also dates back to ancient Egyptian times, reincarnating ceaselessly over the centuries while passing on the mantle of the flying hero. In the present day, he is leader of the JSA and leads the others in standing up to Black Adam’s aggression. Collet-Serra notes that some DC writers have forged a connection between the two over the years that dates back several millennia. But the movie isn’t going to get tangled up with that.

“In the comics, there are clear references of like, ‘Hey, I saw you 5,000 years ago. You remember me?’ We’re not doing that,” the filmmaker says. “It would be too confusing. Obviously, Hawkman reincarnates, so how many times do you need to reincarnate and still remember? All these rules [are something] you don’t want to set until those characters are really established.”

Hodge’s Hawkman is repulsed by Black Adam’s tactics but shares some of his stubbornness. “He is a very driven character that knows that he’s on the right side,” Collet-Serra says. “Definitely, he’s a leader. He wants to bring this team together, and bring a certain stability to the world. Hawkman has a very strong sense of what’s right or wrong, and Black Adam challenges that.”

Dr. Fate is known for his distinctive golden helmet and supernatural abilities, but Collet-Serra says this Black Adam opponent’s other superpower is raw charisma.  While Fate can’t overpower Black Adam in the strength department, he might be able to reason with him.

“You need a special actor to play, basically, a legend,” the filmmaker explains. “Dr. Fate is a very powerful being, so you need someone like Pierce who can play powerful without it being overly done. He can do it in a very subtle way. I mean, he’s one of the coolest people in the world—he was James Bond! But as a person, he’s magnetic, so warm with such gravitas.”

While Hawkman and Dr. Fate are the veterans, the JSA also includes some relative novices. “With Cyclone and Atom Smasher, they’re also very beloved characters, but we’ve gone the younger route in this,” Collet-Serra says.

Quintessa Swindell’s Cyclone hails from a family of heroes and now has to live up to that legacy, overshadowed by a grandmother who was known as Red Tornado. “It's always fun when you introduce characters in a team that have never really seen combat before, so the audience gets to experience it through those fresh eyes,” Collet-Serra says. “And the same with Atom Smasher, even though Atom Smasher is a bit more experienced. They’re close in age, and together they have a bond: We are the new ones here, let’s not screw it up.”

Noah Centineo’s Atom Smasher can make himself gigantic, but also feels crushed by the expectations that come with his powers. “He’s still not sure that this is what he wants to do,” Collet-Serra says. “He thinks this is what he wants to do. He thinks he’s on the right side, but he has a lot more questions.”

That seems to be a running theme in Black Adam. The more certain you are that you’re right, the less likely that’s true.