Following a screening of next week’s Supergirl episode “The Last Children of Krypton” (see a preview here), Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg and actor Tyler Hoechlin discussed the episode at a press Q&A. Among the subjects discussed was, of course, Hoechlin’s approach to playing Supergirl’s version of the Man of Steel, Superman. Did he have any influences? And what kind of Superman did he want to push forth? Here’s what he had to say:
“Because I distinctively stayed away from every other Superman thing, I am very ignorant of the past films and series,” Hoechlin admits. “The one I grew up with was Dean Cain on Lois & Clark; that was my Superman growing up. I did not go back and watch any of the Christopher Reeve movies; I haven’t seen the current ones. I wanted to do that because as an actor, I wanted zero temptation to imitate or emulate anything.
“I had a great meeting with Andrew and Greg [Berlanti] where we all kind of really hit it off about what we all personally found interesting about the character, and I felt very convicted in committing to those ideas,” Tyler continues. “I never wanted to do something and be like ‘oh, that felt a little too much like Reeve, or that wasn’t close enough to do what they did with that.’ If something’s similar, it’s similar. If it’s completely off, then it’s completely off, but it was never intentionally trying to hit a beat or hit something that was done in the past. They are just the things that we committed to from the very beginning. I think there’s something very freeing, creatively, when you commit to something that you believe in, personally. If the reception today was that everyone hated it, I’d be like ‘well, that sucks. That really sucks.’ But I committed to what I honestly thought was great about it, and if that’s what everybody else sees about it, then that’s fine. The worst thing is to try to do something, thinking that it’s what other people will think is right about it, and then they still don’t like it, because then you’ve failed without even trusting yourself to do something that you believed in in the first place. That was really the process going into it.”
Most important for Hoechlin was that his Superman is always doing what he wishes everyone else would do, if they could do what he could do. “That’s really kind of it,” he says. “So if it’s a moment of comforting somebody, then it’s a moment of comforting somebody. If it’s a moment of stopping someone else from harming someone else, then that’s what it is. But I think for him, I think he recognizes the symbol that he is and what he means to everybody, so the moment in the first episode of walking through the DEO and shaking everyone’s hand, I think everything about him is to make everyone else realize they can be their own version of Superman. He’s only doing what he’s capable of doing because of the talents and abilities that he has, but as long as you are also doing everything you can with the abilities that you have, you’re doing the same thing. So you, in essence, are Superman; you just can’t see through walls, and you can’t blow things up with your eyes. But at the end of the day, the intention is the same.”
“I think it’s like anything that Greg and I do,” Andrew Kreisberg adds from a producers’ perspective. “We don’t do straight-out adaptations of specific comic book stories. It always goes through the alchemy machine, so we cherry-pick the best parts of things that we’ve seen, that we’ve read, that we’ve watched. There’s obviously a big heaping of Richard Donner, which there’s also a big heaping of Richard Donner on The Flash. That was the Superman that Greg and I grew up on. That was the one that really colored our view of the character. But there’s a healthy dose of the animated series, which I was a huge fan of. There’s a little bit of Lois & Clark, certainly, in the office place. And there’s a little bit of Man of Steel in there, with Cadmus and their viewpoint. And it all gets put into the machine and it comes out as something fresh and new. But just as Tyler was talking about, we’re not wanting to watch the old ones and taking our cues from that; we based it on everything that there is, whether it’s Henry Cavill, or Brandon Routh, or Christopher Reeve, or Dean Cain, or Gerard Christopher… everybody takes everything that there is, and sort of distills it down into one version that they like that has maybe a little bit more of this, and a little bit more of that, and the Superman that Tyler and Greg and I created is our favorite version of Superman, because it has all of the little bits that we like, all put together.”
“I read some reviews that they loved how it was sort of a call back to the more ‘boy scout’ version of Christopher Reeve, and yet, I couldn’t see Christopher Reeve having that scene with J’Onn where the two of them are ready to come to blows over Kryptonite,” Kreisberg continues. “What I loved about that scene is that they both have a valid point of view; they’re both right and they’re both wrong, and those are the best scenes. The anger that Tyler was willing to show, which I thought was so brave, especially when you’re wearing that costume, made him feel adult and contemporary, and more than just a boy scout in tights. It is this gestalt version of Superman, just as they all should be. I’m sure when Brandon was doing it, he had all the previous versions, and I’m sure when Henry does it, he has all the previous versions. Not just the actors, but the creators. It’s like Hamlet, a little bit. Everybody plays it, but everybody brings something different to it, and the people who come subsequent sometimes take a little bit of what has come before, and then you add something new.”
Superman appears in the Monday, October 17 episode of Supergirl, titled “The Last Children of Krypton.” You can read more about that one here.