Antje Traue To Battle 'Superman' As Faora

Zack Snyder's Superman: The Man of Steel may have its secondary villain, or villainess, as it were. Deadline reports that German actress Antje Traue, who was in Pandorum (as pictured above) is the frontrunner to play an as-yet unnamed character who will gang up on Superman (Henry Cavill) with Michael Shannon's General Zod. More info on her potential role is after the break.

We still don't know specifically what role Antje Traue would play, but the obvious supposition is that she's in line to play Ursa,played by Sarah Douglas in Superman and Superman II. Antje Traue sure looks the part. But is the role really Ursa?

Latino Review did report not long ago that there is a female villain in the film, a character by the name of Faora Hu-Ul. She appeared in the '60s and is a big-time Kryptonian criminal and was probably a big part of the inspiration for Ursa in the Richard Donner films. That was the same report where Krypton was described as being a massively urban, Coruscant-type world, which is hopefully really where Zack Snyder is going with The Man of Steel.UPDATE: Just after publishing this, I saw that Variety has confirmed that Antje Traue is Faora, as discussed above. While it doesn't have specifics, the trade suggests she'll play a character based on a later revision of Faora, "the version of Faora that debuted in Action Comics #779 as a Pokolistanian aide of General Zod. That character was an orphan metahuman with the ability to disrupt molecular bonds, which allowed her to create a mutagenic virus that served as the linchpin of Zod's plan."

Here are a couple other images of Antje Traue, followed by a summary of Faora's history, and an Action Comics cover with her kicking Superman in the face.

Faora Hu-Ul was a serial killer born on the planet Krypton. A self-professed "man-hater", she targeted only male Kryptonians and ran a concentration camp where she kept other Kryptonians as slaves. Faora Hu-Ul claimed over twenty-three lives before she was arrested. Faora was sentenced to over three-hundred years of incarceration inside the Phantom Zone – the longest sentence ever handed to a female prisoner, and the second-longest sentence over all. As Faora was trapped inside the Phantom Zone, she, along with many others, survived the destruction of Krypton. Faora was an expert at the Kryptonian martial art of Horo-Kanu, which utilized the pressure points on the Kryptonian body. This made her an extremely dangerous foe for Superman to face in hand-to-hand combat—he was forced to flee from their first encounter.