Superdad soars
A CLEAN-CUT MAN OF STEEL RETURNS TO TV AND FACES A NEW CHALLENGE – FATHERHOOD
From the black and white The Adventures Of Superman, to Christopher Reeve’s trailblazing blockbusters to next month’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the Man of Steel has been performing heroic feats on screen for more than 80 years now.
So, when the Last Son of Krypton’s latest iteration was announced in the new TV series Superman & Lois, it raised a valid question – does the world really need another one? Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch, who play the title characters in the series that premiered globally last week, admit they asked themselves the same question.
“I think we maybe all shared some of the questions at the beginning, of what it was going to be and was it just going to be another superhero show?,” says Hoechlin, who first appeared in the red and blue costume in Supergirl, which is part of the same shared world as Superman & Lois, the so-called “Arrowverse”.
“And I think the answer early on was ‘no, it’s not – it’s going to be a family drama that just happens to have a father who is Superman’.”
For the uninitiated, the premise of the new show is that Superman – aka Clark Kent – has married his long-time love, intrepid Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane, and they are now parents to very different twin teenage boys. As they ponder a return to Superman’s country home town of Smallville, they realise being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and winning Pulitzer Prizes don’t necessarily help with the day-to-day demands of career, work-life balance and parenting.
“Nobody has seen this version of Superman and Lois Lane,” says Tulloch. “The amount of complexity that adds to the series as a whole, having these two teenagers and everything they are going through in their lives – and having it really be more of a family drama with elements of superhero stuff and big set pieces and all of that.”
Though he’s been arguably the most enduring superhero in comic book history since first appearing in 1938, Superman’s unflagging moral rectitude has sometimes been disparaged as predictable and dull, earning him the tag “the Big Blue Boy Scout”.
Hoechlin, who describes himself as a “hopeless romantic” and a positive soul in real life, is more than happy to lean heavily into his character’s do-gooder reputation. Given the proliferation of darker, grittier comic books and films that have emerged as a reaction to the wholesome big, red S, he argues the most radical path he can take is to return Superman to his roots.
“I spent a lot of years watching that transition,” he says. “We got down a path of ‘we’re just seeing the heroes that are always the hero and we want to see them tempted and go the other way’.
“I think we have done so much of that, so with this character it felt like the right time to say ‘let’s go back to someone who does choose good all the time’. That’s not easy. And I think it’s the thing that gets lost in that idea that it’s boring he always does the right thing. To me it’s not – it’s not always an easy decision to make. So, to see the challenges he faces and in spite of those, still choosing to go down that path, for me it’s inspiring.”