The Superman reboot is almost here, and, according to the new trailer, tickets are officially on sale for James Gunn’s 2025 DC tentpole. But while some fans are ready to pit the DCU’s David Corenswet against the DCEU’s Henry Cavill in a Man of Steel battle royale, Corenswet himself is looking a little further back and comparing himself to Tom Welling’s Clark Kent in Smallville.
In a chat with Entertainment Weekly, the 31-year-old actor didn’t shy away from comparisons. But instead of mentioning Cavill’s ultra-ripped, god-like Kal-El, he pointed to Smallville‘s Tom Welling as his inspiration. “I’ve also got a lot of physical comparisons to Tom Welling,” he said. “When I was growing up, he was the Superman who was on TV every week.”
Smallville premiered in October 2001. That means Corenswet would’ve been around eight at that time. Superman has been a lot of things to a lot of people. But for Corenswet, it was Welling’s grounded, boy-next-door Clark Kent who left a mark. “I sneaked episodes of Smallville while growing up after school, and I remember seeing Superman Returns in the theaters,” he told ScreenRant during a Q&A last December. “Since then, I’ve seen so many iterations and read so much that it jumbles together and becomes this grand arc.”
And the new Superman isn’t the only one on set who grew up in the shadow of the Kent farm. Nicholas Hoult, who is playing Lex Luthor for Gunn’s film, also cited Smallville as his Lex origin story. “I think my first ever Lex I saw was you,” Hoult told Smallville’s Michael Rosenbaum on Inside of You. “That was the show I would watch and see my first iterations of Superman and Lex… You did inhabit him with such depth and charm,” he continued by praising Rosenbaum’s take on the character.
What’s wild is that Smallville was almost not a thing. Originally planned as a Bruce Wayne prequel series, the show pivoted to Clark Kent after Batman was benched in favor of Christopher Nolan’s big screen movie. What we got instead was a ten-season deep dive into Superman’s teenage angst, small-town dilemmas, and slow-burn superpower development. It was “No tights, no flight” until the very last episode. And somehow, it worked wonderfully.
Corenswet seems to be leaning into that same spirit. Yes, his Superman will fly. Yes, there will be action (I mean, they just showed him knocking the teeth out of a bad guy’s mouth). But from what he’s said so far in interviews, he’s channeling the kindness, the awkward charm, and the midwestern decency that Welling’s Clark Kent embodied. And considering Smallville is still widely considered one of the best Superman adaptations ever, that’s really not a bad version for David Corenswet’s Last Son of Krypton to be compared to.
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