By Frazier Tharpe Noua Unu Studio
“Love you,” David Corenswet calls out to his onscreen archnemesis. “Say it back!”
Nicholas Hoult—the Lex Luthor to Corenswet’s Superman—does not say it back as he walks out of Corenswet’s suite, but he is smirking as if he’s used to being trolled by his costar.
Downstairs, the Caesar’s Palace casino floor is buzzing even more than usual on this spring weekday in Las Vegas. Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio are on hand for Warner Bros.’ panel at the annual CinemaCon convention, so movie fans are mingling with the dead-eyed gamblers. But appropriately enough, anyone searching for the world’s next Superman has to look up, to one of the highest floors in a tower here. Corenswet and I originally had plans to meet at The Palm, but he prefers the more secluded vibe up in his suite, where he’s been hunkered down with Hoult and other friends. The calendar page has just turned from March to April—which means Corenswet’s days of being able to indulge his privacy are numbered. In a couple of hours he’ll throw on a suit and go before an auditorium of theater-chain owners and film-media types alongside his writer-director James Gunn, costar Rachel Brosnahan, and Hoult to make one of their first presentations for Superman, one of the most anticipated superhero movies in years—and one of Hollywood’s biggest gambles in recent memory.
At the moment, though, Corenswet is in jeans and a tee, with his feet up, happy to enjoy a meal away from prying eyes. “At this point, the reason not to go to the restaurant is just because it’s easier to talk. And I don’t know, I’m an introvert, so I like to be quiet,” Corenswet says with a chuckle. “This is where I hope that I’m, well, cut out for this, because I don’t particularly like going out. I am not a big restaurant or public person.”
Unfortunately for Corensweet, the success of Superman would mean the complete destruction of his privacy. It is, in non-hyperbolic terms, one of the first superhero films in recent history that absolutely needs to work: A complete relaunch of the DC Comics cinematic universe—a master plan of interconnected films and series—depends on it. Corporate-franchise stakes aside, it would also just be cool to have both a truly, thoroughly great modern Superman with actual legs. We’re certainly overdue for one; as Batman, Spider-Man, and B and even C comics characters have flourished with trilogies and resets, America’s greatest hero has been plagued by stop-start adaptations for going on 20 years, leaving fans wondering if the genre needs or wants another Superman adventure right now, and what a successful one would even look like.
Gunn, who along with his producing partner Peter Safran has been tapped to spearhead a new era of DC Comics films for Warner Bros., thinks he has cracked the code, and that Corenswet was the codebreaker. It’s a massive responsibility for any actor to have to fulfill, and there’s even more on the line than your average hundred-million-budget blockbuster.
“The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you choose. We both drink and we find out who is right and to his day,” Corenswet suddenly declares as I plop down into a couch across from him. “Have you seen The Princess Bride?” (I admit that I actually haven’t; Corenswet assigns it to me as homework.) The next Man of Steel is a jazz-loving theater kid who just so happens to look like the greatest superhero to ever do it. But is he heroic enough to pull off the most daring rescue of a comic book franchise yet?
“Before I saw David, I saw one Superman,” James Gunn tells me over the phone.
With all due respect to all actors who’ve worn the red cape over the last few decades, there hasn’t been a guy whose visage—the jawline, the wavy black hair—has so thoroughly evoked 1938 Action Comics Issue no. 1 since Christopher Reeves. Corenswet looks like a composite of Reeves, Tom Welling, and Henry Cavill. (“And actually, a lot of people do not look like Superman,” Gunn wisecracks.) But Corenswet himself also embodies the good-natured attitude, small-town sunny disposition, and that earnestness that’s so, well, alien among a sea of earthbound cynicism and anxiety. It’s apparent from the moment you sit down across from him, and it never feels forced or phony. There’s no whisper of a performance—this is just how he is.
Nicholas Hoult famously read for Clark Kent before landing Lex Luthor; when we talk by phone, he admits that the main role was Corenswet’s for the taking. “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,” he says. “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.”
Gunn expected to cast a wide net over Hollywood and conduct a lengthy search for his lead. Instead, he found his man on day one. He still went through the motions, sitting across from some 400 would-be Clark Kents, but he couldn’t shake Corenswet, whom he’d coincidentally just watched in Ti West’s Pearl. “From the very beginning, he was the guy to beat, frankly,” Gunn says. He also saw his eventual Lois Lane on the same day: “She was probably [only] the eighth Lois I saw read. You [think], God, is this really right? Can it be this easy?”
Corenswet was similarly wary. Until now he’s been steadily bubbling just under the radar with supporting parts in films like Pearl and Twisters. But for those who aren’t Ryan Murphy Universe completists and didn’t sit with The Politician or Hollywood, in which he had supporting roles, this is a zero-to-60 leap to the big leagues in .05 seconds. Despite writing what Gunn describes as a “beautiful” handwritten letter following his audition that factored in him ultimately landing the gig, once he actually got the offer he started running down all the ways this wouldn’t benefit his career. “A role like Superman seems like something that everybody would want, and that’s not true,” Corenswet reasons. “There are some people who wouldn’t want that role and who would, if given the opportunity, say no. I am obviously not one of those people. But I certainly tried to think of reasons not to.”
“Most great things in life come with tradeoffs, even if it’s just something like having a lot of trouble [dealing with] being recognizable in public,” he continues. “You can’t think about it in too much specific detail because you don’t know what it’ll really look like for you, or whether it’ll happen. Who knows?” he adds in a tone more hopeful than anyone fronting a movie with a nine-figure price tag should realistically be, “Maybe nobody will recognize me.”
Corenswet has avoided the Hollywood mix. He lives just outside of Philadelphia, near the same small-town Pennsylvania stomping grounds where he grew up and developed a love for acting as a child in plays like Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. He was also inspired by his late father, “a theater actor in New York who never really made his living doing it particularly, but just had a great love of the traditions,” Corenswet says. “He was trying to make a career of it, but he didn’t find enough success for it to be able to sustain a family. And so, when he wanted to have a family, he decided to do the sensible thing and become a lawyer. And that’s what I was going to do, too, if I wasn’t able to establish something at a certain point.” It was starting a family of his own that brought Corenswet back from the last couple years living in LA, or as he describes it, “an expensive place to keep my stuff.”
Corenswet certainly seems grounded. When I watch him present at CinemaCon, his introvert gene appears to kick in ever so slightly as he speaks before the large crowd. But in conversation, he is genuinely, almost uncannily unphased. “I don’t know whether there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t really feel the pressure—which is not to say that I feel like I know what’s going to happen,” Corenswet says with a shrug. “But the pressure that I feel is the pressure to show up for James and deliver for him.”
Corenswet’s cast members cosign his unflappable persona with a casual reverence. Nicholas Hoult describes it to me as “otherworldly”: “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.”
“I’m totally in awe of how grounded David’s felt through this process,” Rachel Brosnahan tells me over Zoom. “He’s been ready for it and I don’t know where that comes from. He takes the responsibility seriously, and I know how important it was to him to do everything he could to rise to the challenge. And if he ever felt the pressure, it never showed…. We’ve only worked together on this project, but I sense that this is something that he carries with him throughout his life. He’s laser focused on the task at hand, he prepares incredibly well and then takes a deep breath, puts two feet on the ground and lets it fly.”
Corenswet’s zen attitude is not an accident. “If I had any religious upbringing, it was probably a Buddhist upbringing, sort of a Tibetan Buddhist,” he says. “Not in a religious sense at all, basically just mindfulness meditation. My family went to a mindfulness retreat center every summer for a week.”
That emotional steadiness was just one of the many different layers Gunn was looking for as he crafted his take on Supes. “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,” Gunn says. Like every James Gunn film before it, Superman is, as he describes it, “tonally complex,” an uneven, twisted alchemy of “drama, comedy, and action—although I do think that some of the drama and action probably supersedes the comedy [in this movie] in a lot of ways.” That mix made finding the perfect Clark Kent an even greater challenge. “I couldn’t go for someone that didn’t work. 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.”
In Corenswet, Gunn found the alien he was looking for. “The easy part is, he looks like Superman,” Gunn says dryly. “But the fact that David is a theater kid that’s so athletic is even weirder. I don’t know if anybody I’ve worked with before would’ve been able to do this stuff, besides maybe Chris Pratt.”
In an ironic turn of events, one of pop culture’s most famous and enduring superheroes is, in 2025, less of a safe bet than characters who previously weren’t well-known outside of Forbidden Planet, like Gunn’s earlier wards, the Guardians of the Galaxy and their talking racoon, or, honestly, even Iron Man. In a landscape where cynicism, satire, and sarcasm rule, where even Perry Mason, Esq. gets a gritty reboot, an earnest hero whose motto is “Truth, justice, and the American Way,” seems, especially at this particular stage of the country’s history, woefully outdated. So you either reshape Superman to fit today’s times—potentially compromising what makes him Superman to begin with—or wrestle with an adaptation that feels blatantly out-of-step with the zeitgeist. Gunn found a third way: Craft an alternate universe that bears strong similarities to ours, where Superman’s optimism and morals set a standard to strive for.
The result is one of the most distinct superhero films in a long time, with a tone that feels honest and true to the spirit of Superman—and therefore at odds with pretty much everything else in the genre right now. Gunn’s approach is colorful, in both its palette and the costumes; proudly fantastical, with flying orbs, robots, portals, and giant monsters; and at times endearingly, intentionally corny (see: Krypto the super dog). But late in the third act, Superman delivers an impassioned monologue about himself that essentially states Gunn’s thesis about the character and his core values. You won’t find any controversial neck-snapping here.
“There are things you have to hit about Superman that are indelible to the character,” Corenswet says. “The things we’re aiming for are the things that are truest and therefore most interesting about Superman, the things that set him apart from other heroes. The fact that he is essentially free from angst and turmoil internally. He’s a good guy who had a great upbringing, loving parents, has wonderful relationships with his friends, and a romantic relationship, and loves what he does. He doesn’t have the Batman thing of having lost his parents early and doesn’t feel the burden of this terrible city that he has to come and save. Metropolis is a wonderful, cosmopolitan almost utopia—it just happens to get invaded by Kaijus and other monsters and whatnot every now and then.”
“I think that oftentimes people can see Superman as Pollyanna,” Gunn says. “They [say] ‘How can we make Superman cool?’ So if it’s the ’90s, they give him a mullet. But the thing is that he’s not cool. He’s kind. He loves little kids. He wants little kids to like him. I think it’s about owning that and being okay with that. It’s not trying to hippify him, you know?”
Gunn auditioned his lead not with an action scene or some tense face-off with Lex Luthor, but instead, a nearly 10-page two-hander with Lois that’s like a scene out of the old Lois & Clark TV series, with the banter dialed all the way up to peak Amy Sherman-Palladino.
“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 says. “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.”
That part comes early in the film; it’s also the first full scene Gunn and Warner Bros. chose to screen for me in the spring, before I eventually saw the full film. It establishes Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s relationship in medias res, with an emphasis on their borderline screwball romantic energy. The last few Supes films have been marked by a straightforward solemnity, with our hero burdened by a savior complex and all but scaring the hoes because of it. This five-minute sequence has more pace, wit, cracked smiles, sexual tension, and actual tension than those last movies had across their whole run times. And it’s every bit a duet with Brosnahan, who says, “You really learn a lot about who the characters are and how their relationship has unfolded up until this point.” Corenswet himself is tasked with conveying several sides of Clark as he goes from flirty and romantic to indignant and self-righteous.
“Seeing what it was like with both [Rachel and David], that chemistry was there,” Gunn says. “David read with another actress who was very, very, very good. But his chemistry with Rachel was better. And frankly, Nick read with Rachel, and his chemistry wasn’t so hot with her, and his chemistry was actually much better with another actor…. There’s a looseness to David, whereas Nick is very structured and Rachel is very structured. I do think that very often onscreen chemistry is when opposites attract.”
It’s telling that Gunn placed as much emphasis on this scene and these chemistry reads as he did on just finding his Clark; if you want a signpost of where he’s going with his take, this is it. Brosnahan doesn’t mince words: “To me, Superman has always been a love story. Superman is an alien who loves humans and is curious about them—and what brings out our humanity better than getting unexpectedly knocked off your ass by love?”
Now it’s my turn to give Corenswet his own homework assignment: He has never seen Kill Bill, so when I cite David Carradine’s infamous speech as Bill about the caricature of Clark Kent being Superman’s indictment of humanity, the reference is lost on him. But he understands the argument, and says that Superman doesn’t quite fit Bill’s visions.
“This was one thing that James said early on,” Corenswet recalls. “Which is that we all have multiple characters that we play depending on the setting that we’re in. So, it’s not quite true to say that there’s a third person, but I think the true person, the character without pretense, is somewhere between Clark and Superman. And they’re both roles that he plays.”
Gunn has, naturally, seen that Kill Bill speech, and disagrees so vehemently with it that he actually addresses Bill’s idea in the Superman script. “It says it in the script: Oftentimes people say that Clark Kent is a disguise and Superman is the real person, but I don’t see it that way, or at least that’s not the way this iteration of Superman is,” Gunn says. “This Superman is a character who, if you only know Superman, you don’t know the person. If you only know Clark Kent, you don’t fully know the person.”
Corenswet and Gunn very much built the character together. “I think in a lot of ways, James and I are made for each other,” Corenswet says. “James has this habit of, as you’re working on the scene, he’ll sit back by the monitors on the God mic and he’ll yell directions at you, which is not how directors generally work. You usually do the scene, they say cut, and then they come and say very privately and quietly, ‘I loved that moment where you did this. What if we tried something else in the next one?’ That is something that would throw lots of actors off, and understandably so. For me, the second that happened, I went, okay, this is going to be great because I have no idea what I’m doing. I desperately need a director. I need a director who knows what they want and is willing to say it out loud without too much politeness and without beating around the bush. If I’m no good, tell me I’m no good, and then let’s work together to make me good.”
Corenswet became so intent on nailing Gunn’s vision that it almost started to irk Gunn. “After we finished shooting, we were hanging out and [James] affectionately—I think—described me,” Corenswet says with a big smile. “He said a very nice thing: ‘You’re a filmmaker, and so you want to be involved in the filmmaking and you want to help make the film as good as possible.’ Then he said, ‘I think you’re also like a kid sticking his finger in light sockets and sometimes I gotta slap you on the wrist and say stop fucking doing that.’”
“Sometimes his questions are great, and I totally see where they make him better, and because they make him better, they make the movie better,” Gunn remembers thinking. “But every once in a while, it’s just one question too many, and it’s like, Oh, my God, just, David, stop, stop, for a minute. And the beautiful thing about me and David is that he knows that about himself and he knows where my limits are. And when I say, ‘David, shut the fuck up,’ David totally gets it and does not take that personally. And we have a really, to me, beautiful relationship in that way because I’m used to being very sensitive with actors, and you have to be by default, because many actors are incredibly sensitive because they’re putting their emotions on the line onscreen. But with David, he’s not that way. He’s not sensitive like that.”
Corenswet and Gunn are well aware of the stakes of this project and the atmosphere that it is entering—one thick with a particularly frustrated subset of fans who feel like the grittier Henry Cavill version of Superman suffered an unfairly truncated run. Corenswet famously hailed Superman as a dream role almost 10 years ago in an interview with EW, where he more or less predicted this swing from the bleakness of Zack Snyder’s vision to something sunnier. “I think that’s the least interesting thing I could have said,” Corenswet admits now, swearing that he was not manifesting the role, that it never seemed like even a slight possibility for him. “Simply because with a great character like Superman, you want great artists and writers and actors to explore all of the possibilities of them. The one way they become boring is if you just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And so, just like Chris Nolan took Batman and did something darker and more grounded with the character, Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill explored a side of Superman that hadn’t been explored on the big screen. So, all I was saying was they’re doing it so well. Whenever they’re finished, I’d love to see the next one go the other way, and let’s see the other side. In the same way, after Chris Nolan’s Batman films and after Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson, there are a lot of people who are like, Where’s our funny, campy, fantastical Batman?”
That’s the sort of diplomacy you’d expect from Corenswet. But the fact remains that, beyond just winning over disgruntled separatist fanboys, this Superman also has to dominate the box office in order to fully grease the wheels on Gunn’s DC train. “This is not the riskiest endeavor in the world,” Gunn tells me the day after definitively picture-locking the film. “Is there something riding on it? Yeah, but it’s not as big as people make it out to be. They hear these numbers that the movie’s only going to be successful if it makes 700 million or something and it’s just complete and utter nonsense. It doesn’t need to be as big of a situation as people are saying.”
And even—or especially—if the movie breaks box office records, Corenswet still has to contend with the curse of playing Superman. Look how things went for Cavill and Brandon Routh before him. (By the way, Corenswet and I agree: Routh’s Superman Returns is overhated. “So many great performances, very strong film,” he says.) Brosnahan relates something Corenswet said about his decision to accept the role that deeply “moved” her, and which Corenswet also repeated to me: “Ultimately, what I landed on for myself was, if this is the only role I get to play for the rest of my life, and that means whether I get to play it once or get to play it 10 times, would I still say yes? And the answer was yes.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Noua Unu Studio
Styled by Spencer Phipps
Grooming by Anna Bernabe using Oribe & 111Skin
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina