Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER

---

Greg Williams visits the Superman set in Atlanta as David Corenswet first suits up and later makes a flying visit to Julliard to discuss vulnerability, confidence and his Lego plans for opening weekend.

20 February 2024

I arrive at Atlanta’s Trilith Studios on a cloudy Thursday in February to meet David Corenswet. It’s no ordinary day for the actor who was cast as Superman in the DCU’s ‘soft re-boot’ of the Man Of Steel story in June 2023. There’s a palpable sense of excitement on a sound stage on day one of production as co-CEOs of DC Studios James Gunn and Peter Safran await their lead dressed for the first time in his iconic suit and cape. I find Corenswet putting the final touches to his costume and hair in the make-up trailer. His hair is black with a curl hanging over his forehead and he’s wearing the latest iteration of the newly-designed Super suit. He’s worked out to up his muscle mass and after more than six months of prep, looks ready to embody Kai-El, the son of Krypton who lands on earth and becomes the superhero the world needs. In a bid to keep everything super secret Corenswet wraps up in a black cotton cape to protect the suit from prying eyes as we walk across from the trailers to the soundstage and studio meeting rooms where the cast will have their first table read. 

When Corenswet enters the soundstage the atmosphere is electric, Gunn and Safran are clearly stoked to see their vision come to life. I ask Corenswet how he’s feeling. ‘A little surreal. But in a good way,’ he smiles. He adopts a kneeling hero pose, and turns this way and that in front of the cameras, his red cape billowing behind him, the lights glancing off the blue of the suit. His on-screen nemesis, Nicholas Hoult, newly bald as Lex Luthor, arrives suited and booted and the actors josh with each other. “Are you NOT wearing your trunks outside your pants?’ Corenswet jokes. It’s not the first time they’ve been on a set together (Corenswet visited the set of Rebel In The Rye when Hoult was filming in 2017 as a newly-graduated actor) but it’s the first time they’re worked together. ‘That’s SUPERMAN!’ Hoult stages whispers excitedly as Corenswet swishes past. 

Two days later, back in their own clothes, the cast and crew gather in a conference room to read through the script before walking outside to take a group photo. Rachel Brosnahan (playing Lois Lane) leans against Corenswet as he crosses his arms – unconsciously mimicking the classic pose of Superman as he smiles. He’s a week away from principal photography beginning on Superman’s birthday in the comic books, 29 February. Corenswet will kick off his reign as Clark Kent/Superman filming sequences for the Fortress of Solitude in Svalbard, Norway…

5 June 2025

Fast forward 16 months and the actor is meeting me at Julliard, the performing arts conservatory in New York. He’s travelled from his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was born and raised and now lives with his actor wife, Julia Warner, and baby daughter. It’s the calm before the storm. Though the Superman team have presented the movie at 2024’s San Diego Comic Con and the teaser trailer broke records for the most views in a 24-hour period for both DC and Warner Bros, reaching over 250 million views across all platforms, Corenswet is still able to go about his business in relative anonymity. On a warm June morning in Manhattan, we both know that is about to change as we stand outside the institution where his acting journey began – a place he refers to as ‘home’.

Corenswet attended the school after graduating from Penn, recalling the phone call telling him he’d made the selection as though it were yesterday. He graduated from Juilliard in 2016 with a bachelor of Fine Arts degree and worked on TV shows House Of Cards before Ryan Murphy’s The Politician and Hollywood. Though he’d appear in Affairs of State in 2018, his transfer to movies came with Look Both Ways and then playing a rakish movie theatre projectionist in Ti West’s Pearl. That led to a nebbish role as a weather-chasing scientist in blockbuster Twisters, his delightful, nerdy performance possibly a calling card for playing klutzy Daily Planet reporter and Superman alter-ego, Clark Kent. 

We enter the building where staff remember him from his student days and wander through the corridors and rooms as he recalls his time here. ‘This is our main room that we hung out in, where we had our first-year scene study class,’ he says as we walk into a cavernous space with stacked chairs and a piano. ‘It’s where we did our discovery project, which is the first production you do. A lot of hours spent in this room.’ He wanders over to the piano and starts noodling with the keys. ‘One thing I would always do is, I’d end up playing the piano. Because it’s a music school, they had pianos in every room. So, after hours, I would just learn specific songs. I learned this song because my classmate, J.J., sang it in singing class: ‘Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry’.”

As the music echoes round the room it conjures up images of being a fledgling actor dreaming of getting a big break and I think back to asking him on set in Atlanta how he found out he’d succeeded in landing Superman after an intense audition process. ‘It was June 27th, 2023, at 2:30 in the afternoon,’ he’d replied, fast, of the phone call from James Gunn. Clearly a huge moment for him. ‘I was like, ‘How long do I have to keep this secret?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we have to tell people immediately. It’s going to leak. We’re telling people in an hour’.’ He learnt the same week that he’d got Superman, that his wife, Julia, was pregnant with their first child and due a few days before production was slated to start. A massive step-change in his personal and creative life.

As we walk to another room with a stage I ask if it’s emotional now to return to Julliard. ‘I wouldn’t describe what I feel at the moment as emotional,’ he says sitting in the audience seats. ‘I don’t feel like I’m going to cry, or like I’m overwhelmed. But I’m thinking about a lot of things. I’m remembering a lot of things. They’re very special memories.’ He looks towards the stage where a lone light is standing in the darkness. ‘This is the ghost light, by the way,’ he explains. ‘This is the thing they put in to keep the ghosts away. That’s the lore. I think it’s mostly to stop people from tripping.’

I ask what his teachers thought of him as an actor and student when he used to study and perform in these rooms. ‘That I struggled with being vulnerable. Which I don’t think was true.’ Superman is extraordinarily vulnerable, I say. ‘Well, yeah,’ he nods. ‘I think all characters have to have a certain vulnerability. One of the great things about Nick’s performance as Lex is, there’s a great vulnerability underneath. That’s what gives it stakes. It’s the possibility that things could go wrong for this person. I think that’s what vulnerability is.’ He still, he says, asks a lot of questions, as he did when he studied here. At Julliard he began to question direction to get a deeper understanding of his craft. To follow instruction without conversation is akin to ‘if anybody tells you to jump off a cliff, you  jump off a cliff.’ He wanted to unpack the reasoning more. ‘What you want to be able to do is say; why this cliff? Why now? And where are we hoping I’m going to land? I just like to get clear on that.’

His questioning continued on Superman. ‘If you talk to James [Gunn] that’s the one area where I’m difficult. And very quickly, that can start to sound like an argument. It can sound argumentative to people. He gave me a note that was very much not what I thought was appropriate for the scene. And so I started going back and forth with him a little bit. To anyone watching, it would look like an argument. It looked like I didn’t want to do things the way he wanted them done. And there was one sentence that he said in the heat of it all – you know, face to face. He said one sentence, and I went, ‘Stop. Great. I know exactly what you mean’. I walked back off, and did the thing. And it was what he wanted. I just wanted that moment where I knew what you were talking about.’

We walk to another rehearsal room. ‘It’s smaller than I remember. But it felt like a pretty epic stage, and it’s actually quite intimate. It’s also cool because this is the same theatre that Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline, Christopher Reeve, and Robin Williams performed on.’ Reeve of course went on to be an iconic Superman in Richard Donner’s genre-defining movies, which paved the way for the superhero franchises audiences know now. ‘ He was in the same rooms that I was in, and same theatre here that I performed in. He had a real playfulness about him as an actor generally. It’s funny watching interviews with him, too. He does have a nice edge about him.’

As we walk the corridors we pass the ‘wall of fame’, the photos of actors who have graduated from Julliard’s doors. ‘We’ve got Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, right there,’ Corenswet points out. ‘Bradley Whitford was always somebody we referenced, from The West Wing and Get Out and all kinds of things. Jessica Chastain is on there. Patti LuPone is up there. Jesse J. Perez. This is Jimmy J.J. Jeter, who was in my class.This was like the wall of inspiration.’ He points to Adam Driver. ‘There’s Adam and his wife Joanne. I just remember the day that I walked by [room] 306. The doors were closed, and you’ve got windows on the door so you can see through them. But they had set up black flats on the other side so you couldn’t see in. And on the inside, you just heard sticks slamming together. My buddy was like, ‘Adam Driver’s in there. He’s training for Star Wars.’ I was like, ‘I should break in and watch.’ But I didn’t.’ He finds his own name in a list. ‘There I am on the wall.’

We move onto Theatre One, a black box theatre in the complex where Corenswet did his third-year productions and the wall of fame makes me think of another conversation we had on set. Where I suggested everything would change for him. ‘No,’ he disagreed at the time. ‘It’s just a change to one’s psychology. All the change was that I didn’t have to keep looking for a different job.’ I ask him if he still feels this way. 

“No. But it’s not because I was wrong at the moment. It’s because you talked to me before we filmed the movie. And before you film the movie, all you know is that you get to film the movie. Now we’re a month away from the film releasing. We’ve released two trailers and a bunch of promotional materials. Billboards are going up… I think making the movie, and sharing the movie with the world, are two different things, and will have two different effects, and will change things in different ways. Nothing’s changed for me yet, really. I got to do another movie that I wouldn’t have gotten to do if I weren’t playing Superman. And I had a really, really wonderful and meaningful experience making that movie. [He’s playing real-life NFL running back John Tuggle in Jonathan Levine’s Mr Irrelevant.] At the moment, I mean, apart from going around the world to promote the film – the next two weeks are about as similar to the two weeks before I got Superman. I’m going to be at home, hanging out with my family – you know, watching movies, or cleaning, or cooking, or fixing stuff. You know, normal stuff. And I’m looking forward to that.’

He and his wife have known each other since they did summer theatre together, growing up in Philadelphia. But as we stand in a place he graduated from nearly a decade earlier with aspirations to achieve the success he has, he knows that while his home life might not modulate, his professional life will. ‘If you asked me on July 12th, I’d probably be having some feelings, depending on whether we’re doing very well, what the critics have said…’ He pauses and then looks back at me with a grin. ‘I have this great, big collector’s edition Millennium Falcon Lego that my wife got me as a wrap gift when I finished Superman, and it’s still sitting in my closet at home. I saw it the other day, and I thought, ‘Maybe that’s what I’ll do on opening weekend. I’ll just turn my phone off, and do this enormous Lego for two days.’ So maybe I won’t be apprehensive then either, because I’ll be too excited about my Millennium Falcon.’ He laughs. 

I ask if he had confidence in getting the job when making his self-tape for Gunn and Safran. ‘No, mostly because I saw this sort of old Hollywood humour in it, like a Fred Astaire or a Donald O’Connor or a Jimmy Stewart humour. I was excited to do that, and I thought I’d do a good job with that, but I wasn’t sure that James had intended it to be that way. So for all I knew, that was not going to be what he was looking for, and I had just seen something that wasn’t really there. So there was no confidence that I was going to be the guy for the job.’

Did he have  to have confidence in embodying self-assured Superman – and in stepping onto that Atlanta soundstage on that first day in the suit? ‘I had to fake some confidence doing that,’ he admits. ‘Walking onto this big soundstage with four or five dozen people standing around – lighting and filming and standing behind monitors. I didn’t know James that well by that point. But you go through the fear of people looking at the suit or looking at your hair… I just thought for this I should probably muster up some confidence, even if it was faux-courage, and just try to be as Superman-y as I could.’

Corenswet has been mastering performance nerves for a long time, having started as the son of an actor who later became a lawyer. ‘My dad, who was an actor for many years in New York after college, theatre, and some background work on some things – he saw an audition notice for nine-year-old boys, and thought, ‘I’ve got one of those’. I liked school. I liked the academics of school. But I always had this thing of like: why is this important? Doing theatre – it was much more immediate. You rehearse so that you know what you’re doing when the audience shows up, and the audience shows up because they’re paying money to see the show. I worked at a bunch of regional theatres in Philopterid. So I was about 16. I did theatre in school, and I did a summer theatre programme – Upper Darby Summer Stage – which was a great musical theatre. I took acting quite seriously for my age, but I couldn’t really compete in the musical theatre space. I was not as good a singer, and not as good a dancer, as most of my peers.’

Nonetheless, he got into prestigious Julliard. ‘I think getting into Juilliard was a bigger, clearer path change than when I got the role of Superman, because I was studying Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, doing theatre extracurricular-ly. I had no idea what a path forward as an actor would be, even though I was still excited by it. And when I got the call that I’d gotten into Juilliard, that was the moment when I was like, ‘OK, well, I’m going to be an actor – at least for a while. At least, you know, until I get really good data that I don’t belong here, I’m going to be an actor’.’ If you show up to school every day for four years, you’re going to figure some stuff out, and you’re going to get better. But that was, I think, a very clear split in my path of like: ‘OK, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do it 100% for a while.’

His experience at Julliard clearly paved the way for Superman in the roles he was initially assigned. ‘I was put into roles that were buttoned-up and logical; a lot of patriarchs, and a lot of first half of the twentieth-century young men. The first time I got to do something really crazy was in the beginning of my third year. I played a heroin addict in New York in the ‘90s.’ It’s probably no surprise then that an actor who excelled at playing golden-era Hollywood young men would land Superman, a character born in 1938 in Action Comics and a hero who is known for being thoroughly good and decent. Corenswet nods as we head back out the door. ‘This is what James said about this movie: it’s about Superman, who ultimately is a guy who’s a good person, who’s trying to do his best, in a world where being a good person and doing your best is not necessarily valued.’ I’m left feeling like there’s a real correlation between the amount of views the trailer had and the fact that we all might be looking for some hope and decency in a world where that’s lacking.