| Learning to fly
New Man of Steel Brandon Routh overcomes his cape fear
By JONATHAN SMALL
Brandon Routh's try for an earlier 'Superman' movie never took off.
The first time Brandon Routh saw 1978's "Superman: The Movie" as a kid, he wore blue and red pajamas and a cape and ran around the house until he got a migraine.
But the headaches didn't stop there.
Consider the challenges of embodying this superhero icon. You have to play two different characters, Clark Kent and Superman - sometimes simultaneously. You have to evoke Christopher Reeve, the Superman all fans revere. Oh, and you also have to try not to actually imitate Reeve.
"I had to be okay with it myself and not be concerned about what anyone else would think," Routh says.
He finally was okay with the role the first time he put on the cape, some 20 years after that migraine. "It clicked," he says. "I walked on the set. They didn't want anyone taking photos, so the extras turned their backs. That was cool."
It's Routh's "golly-gee" attitude, plus his resemblance to Reeve, that got him here. Like Clark Kent, Routh hails from the Midwest, in his case, Iowa. ("There was a cornfield that I used to run through to go to the creek," he says, pronouncing the word as "crick.") He escaped the cornfields after a year of college and went to Hollywood, where he appeared on short-lived sitcoms and the soap "One Life to Live."
But even before Routh was selected to fight for truth, justice and the American way, the shadow of Reeve was there. "My first manager said to me, 'Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Christopher Reeve?'" recalls the actor. "I said 'No.' Subsequently, I learned to say 'Yes.'" When he bartended in L.A., customers would comment on the similarity.
But it wasn't until he met the director McG ("Charlie's Angels") that he began to fulfill his destiny: Routh was in fact cast in a "Superman" film, but the plug was pulled on that production over budget concerns. A while later, he got a call from director Bryan Singer, who was working on his own project, "Superman Returns."
Routh, 26, still can't believe that the kid in the Superman p.j.'s is now an adult in a Superman suit. "It's very surreal," he says. But he has also learned to take it seriously. "Some people are quite nervous when they meet me. Which is interesting, because they haven't even seen the movie yet.
"I guess that just shows the power that Superman has."
Originally published on June 25, 2006 | |
