Michael Rosenbaum had a successful seven season run playing Lex Luthor on Smallville, so why did he decide to leave the show? Following in the footsteps of actors like Gene Hackman and John Shea, Michael Rosenbaum took on the role of Superman’s archenemy Lex Luthor when the first season of Smallville aired back in 2001. Throughout Rosenbaum’s seven seasons on the series, Smallville fans saw his initial friendship with Tom Welling’s Clark Kent turn sour as the power-hungry playboy descended into villainy.
Not only did Rosenbaum get a chance to exercise his directing chops on Smallville with the season 6 episode “Freak," but he also scooped a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series for his performance as Lex Luthor. Today, his portrayal of the DC villain is hailed as the best – even compared to other noteworthy portrayals of Lex Luthor by Oscar winners and nominees like Gene Hackman, Kevin Spacey and Jesse Eisenberg.
So, why did Michael Rosenbaum leave Smallville? According to the actor in a 2016 interview with Empire, he’d met with Warner Brothers president John Roth who was keen to have him stay on Smallville for a couple more seasons but simply felt that – after seven years playing Lex – it was time to move on from the character and try something new. Rosenbaum also admitted he was sick of shaving his head for seven years straight to pull off Lex Luthor’s trademark shiny-headed, bald look.
After a pretty eventful final season on Smallville that saw Lex Luthor commit both fratricide (when he paid a hitman to kill his illegally cloned brother Grant Gabriel) and patricide - when he pushed his father Lionel out of a window to his death - Michael Rosenbaum bowed out of Smallville in its season 7 finale “Arctic.” The episode saw Lex head to the Arctic Circle where a final confrontation took place between him and Clark Kent at the Fortress of Solitude before Lex destroyed the Kryptonian hideout. Though Clark was later located in season 8, Lex remained missing and was presumed dead.
Lex Luthor’s relatively open-ended departure from Smallville meant that Michael Rosenbaum could return for the series finale and return he did. The last ever episode of Smallville revealed that Lex had been living underneath the ruins of the Luthor Mansion and using clones of himself to heal the injuries he received when the Fortress of Solitude was destroyed. Ominously, a seven-year flashforward showed that Lex had been elected President of the United States of America.