‘Superman & Lois’ takes off as new series premieres
The Man of Steel and Lois Lane have been married on television before, but viewers now can see what they’re like as parents, too.
DC Universe expands again by launching “Superman & Lois” Tuesday, Feb. 23, on The CW and CTV Sci-Fi Channel. Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch reprise the iconic roles they’ve played on “Supergirl” and in the crossover sagas “Elseworlds” and “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” taking the characters back to Smallville as they raise their sons Jonathan and Jordan (Jordan Elsass, Alexander Garfin). Still there is Lana Lang (Emmanuelle Chriqui), now married to the local fire chief (Erik Valdez) and with her own child, Sarah (Inde Navarrette).
“I really don’t have a history with the character,” friendly “7th Heaven” alum Hoechlin admits about Superman before starting to portray him. “I played baseball and was acting at a young age, so all of my free time was taken up, and comic books weren’t really my thing ... but in what I think in a fortunate way, that lack of history is beneficial, in that I can approach (Superman) in a way that’s very honest and intuitive.”
Tulloch says she feels “it doesn’t get much better” than to land as prominent a part as Lois, and she feels the new show’s appeal is in presenting Lois and
Superman’s earthy alter ego Clark Kent as “modern, working parents who are kind of the best of the best in their careers, but as parents, they’re flailing a lot. Especially in 2021, when we’ve had a difficult past year, a lot of people are struggling. Lois and Clark make mistakes. And their kids react accordingly.”
Hoechlin believes having played Superman a number of times before starting his own show in the role was helpful, “though the tone is very different from what we did on the other shows. We’ve never seen this before, and that’s a very freeing experience on the set.”
The wife of David Giuntoli of ABC’s “A Million Little Things” (and his costar on the earlier “Grimm”), Tulloch
– who used to go by the first name
“Bitsie” professionally – was well into a pregnancy when she first played Lois in the “Elseworlds” miniseries.
“I am very career-driven and ambitious,” Tulloch states in likening herself to
Lois, “so I never saw myself not being a working actress/mother. David has much shorter working days than I do, so it‘s tough on the days when I go to work at 5:30 in the morning and come home at 9 or 10 at night and don’t see my daughter once during the day. I make sure I spend a lot of time with her on the weekends.”