Tim Blake Nelson's Novel SUPERHERO is a Satire About Hollywood and the Making of a Comic Movie Universe

Tim Blake Nelson plays cellular biologist Samuel Sterns in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who first appeared in The Incredible Hulk (2008).

He returned earlier this year in Captain America: Brave New World, as Sterns’ villainous counterpart, The Leader, and he has turned his experience in the MCU, as well as Hollywood as a whole, into the novel “Superhero.”

His second book, which was released earlier this month, is described as a gentle Hollywood satire. It follows the fictional studio, Sparta Comics, and the franchise character, Major Machina. The actor/author explained to The Los Angeles Times:

“It was certainly my intention, to use a world I know really, really well, to examine bigger issues in American culture,” Nelson said. “So you’ve got on the surface level, the big question of why did these movies come out of America? Why did comic books come out of America?

“And why did they capture the imagination of not only America, but the entire world for well over a decade?” Or, he suggested, even longer. “And is that a good thing?” Characters in the novel grapple with all these questions.

At its center is the star, Peter Compton, a larger-than-life genuine movie star, a Sexiest Man Alive-type who has had a public reckoning with his addiction and recovery. Aided by his wife, he’s reached a very good place:

“The more time he spent with her, the better his life got, as if the trust of such a cohesively decent soul engendered success in anyone closely associated, particularly as pertained to business opportunities,” Nelson writes. The novel is full of these understated, wry contradictions — a decent soul with a gift for making good deals.

Compton is impossibly charming, effortfully erudite, and enjoys the status that comes with his stardom. He can make big demands, like bringing along his private chef and upending the production schedule at the last minute- which is a commonplace thing that Nelson says really does happen.

“There is nothing in the novel that I haven’t either experienced personally or heard from a very reliable source,” Nelson said. Which we can take to include the anxious director who brings along what he insists is not an emotional support dog, a star saging the set each day and an assistant producer who appears with a luxury sports car way above his pay grade.

Nelson explained in the interview that he believes novels can reveal things film can’t. “Pictures cannot take you into what a character is thinking and feeling. You can infer, but you can’t know in the way that you can in a novel,” he said. “The writer can tell you as close to the truth about what a person is thinking and feeling and seeing as you’re going to get.”

This sounds like an intriguing look behind the curtain of the Hollywood film industry. “Superhero” by Tim Blake Nelson is available everywhere that books are sold.