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August 1, 2013: Dana Delany on Voicing the Role of Lois Lane

For 18 years Dana Delany has voiced the role of Lois Lane. Best known for playing Lois in "Superman: The Animated Series", Dana reprises the role once again, this time in the latest DC Universe Animated Film, "Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox".

ComicAlliance.com conducted an interview with Dana, asking her all about "Superman: The Animated Series", her thoughts on Lois Lane as a character, and the way women are portrayed in comics. Here are a few excerpts from the interview...

Q: Did that art direction, with its influence from the past, inform your performance?

DD: Yes, definitely. I believe they might have shown me some storyboards first, but it was actually the script itself [that mattered more]. As an actor you just take it from the words, and it was written in that "ratatat" style of the '40s film dialogue. I immediately thought of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, which makes sense because she was a reporter in that film. Rosalind Russell, especially in that movie, always had a quick delivery; kind of snappy, and I just decided I was going to model Lois after Rosalind Russell in that movie.

Q: The first time Lois sees Superman, who's just caught some impossibly huge object that was about to fall on her - with the music swelling and everything - is, "No way."

DD: My god, that was really funny writing. Really clever. You know, one of my favorite Greek myths is "Psyche and Eros." Lois fits into that myth, to me. There's this man who's in love with Psyche and she's in love with him but she can never see him during the day, he only comes to her at night. He says, "You can never light a candle, I can only come to you in darkness." Everything's perfect except she can't see who he is, and she of course spoils it all by lighting a candle. And I feel that way about Superman and Lois. She's constantly trying to figure him out and ruin the whole thing. If she'd just trusted that he was right there in front of her!

That's the best part. It's such a great romantic construct. Lois has no idea that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person. I love that as a metaphor for women - for all of us, for human beings - and how we look at love. We put this person on a pedestal - Superman, the higher being - when Clark Kent is right there in front of us. It's her humanness, which we all have. I liked that, too, that she was not a superhero, she was just a human being who was experiencing the same awe as everybody else with this superhero, but she didn't realize how cool she was herself.

Source: ComicAlliance.com