Summer 2023 was the search for Superman. That May, it was reported that actors David Corenswet (Twisters), Tom Brittney (Grantchester), Andrew Richardson (The Independent), and Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road) were in the mix for the lead role in the James Gunn-directed Superman: Legacy, with Corenswet and Hoult said to be among the top contenders. By June, Gunn had screen tested Corenswet, Brittney, and Hoult, pairing the candidate Clark Kents with potential Lois Lanes Emma Mackey (Barbie), Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton), and Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), respectively.
After having the respective pairs film a heated debate between The Daily Planet reporters Clark Kent and Lois Lane, Corenswet, Hoult, and Brittney advanced to the round of screen tests performed in costume as Superman. A day after reports that Gunn had narrowed the shortlist, Corenswet was announced as the new Man of Steel.
In a GQ profile on the actor titled Can David Corenswet Save Superman?, Gunn revealed that Corenswet was always the front-runner. An actor with supporting roles such films as Pearl and television series like Hollywood and The Politician, Gunn knew from “day one” he’d found his Superman — despite a search that combed through some 400 actors.
“From the very beginning, he was the guy to beat, frankly,” Gunn said. Brosnahan, whose casting as Lois was announced alongside Corenswet, was “probably [only] the eighth Lois I saw read,” he added. “You [think], God, is this really right? Can it be this easy?”
Gunn continued, “I said from the beginning, If I don’t find Superman, I’m not going to do this movie. Because I knew that this was dependent on the guy that’s playing Superman.” The writer-director of Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and The Suicide Squad described his Superman movie as “tonally complex,” blending “drama, comedy, and action — although I do think that some of the drama and action probably supersedes the comedy in a lot of ways.”
That meant finding an actor who could convincingly play those tones as a mild-mannered Daily Planet reporter, who hides his secret identity behind a bumbling persona and hypno glasses; an earnest farm boy humbly raised by adoptive parents in Smallville, Kansas; and the public-facing superhero who wears silly-looking red trunks so children aren’t afraid of the most powerful being on the planet.
“I couldn’t go for someone that didn’t work,” Gunn explained. “I couldn’t go for someone that had the look, but didn’t have the chops. I couldn’t go for someone that had the chops but didn’t have the look. I couldn’t go for someone that had the looks and the chops, but couldn’t do the comedic parts, or couldn’t do the more vulnerable aspects.”
Corenswet has been likened to a composite of past Superman actors Christopher Reeve (the original Superman films), Tom Welling (Smallville), and Henry Cavill (Man of Steel), and as Gunn noted, “Actually, a lot of people do not look like Superman.” Besides Corenswet, who might as well have leapt, with a single bound, out of the pages of Action Comics.
“When I first read the script, I had a slight instinctive feeling that maybe I’m more suited to Lex in terms of what this character is on the page and what I’d been doing acting-wise,” said Hoult, who was cast as Superman’s archnemesis Lex Luthor. “But when I first met David at the screen test, he’d found a patch of sun in the studio and was relaxing in between readings, almost charging up like Superman does from the sun’s power, and there was something about meeting him in that moment…. I mean, he obviously looks exactly like you imagine Clark Kent and Superman to look.”
Hoult went on to describe his Juilliard-trained costar as “otherworldly,” saying, “He’s got this Old Hollywood persona which makes him feel even more relevant and timely to this version of Superman and Clark. It’s his charisma, his idiosyncrasies. He is what he idolizes, that silver screen era of acting and musicals.”
Gunn envisioned his Superman as the embodiment of “truth, justice, and the human way” in a world that “thinks of kindness as old fashioned.” Corenswet happened to bring an old-school flavor to the 10-page scene in which Lois interviews Superman not as the cape-clad Man of Steel, but as Clark Kent.
“James has told me that the one thing that surprised him, that meant something to him initially, was the humor that I brought to that first scene,” Corenswet said. “I immediately read it in the terms of the movies that I grew up on, which are Singin’ in the Rain and His Girl Friday, and the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. Just the timing and the patter and the style of humor — and it turned out that that was what he was imagining.”
Superman — which also stars Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific, Nathan Fillion as the Guy Gardner Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, and María Gabriela de Faría as the Engineer, with Wendell Pierce as Perry White, Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord, Neva Howell as Ma Kent, Pruitt Taylor Vince as Pa Kent, and Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr. — soars into theaters July 11.
