“Even that look for that particular character, finally seeing it on screen, was satisfying,” the actor said in an interview with USA Today
Warning: Spoilers for The Flash follow…
Nicolas Cage is finally opening up about his surprise cameo DC fans have all been talking about for months.
The Academy Award winner, 59, spoke with USA Today this week about his appearance as Superman in The Flash — over two decades after the cancellation of his unproduced 1998 Superman Lives film.
“Well, I was glad I didn’t blink,” Cage joked about the brief cameo, which occurs at the end of the blockbuster.
“For me, it was the feeling of being actualized. Even that look for that particular character, finally seeing it on screen, was satisfying. But as I said, it’s quick,” he added.
The Flash itself was full of cameos, as Cage appeared while Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen hit the multiverse and explored alternate realities featuring Christopher Reeve’s Superman, Helen Slater’s Supergirl, Adam West’s Batman, and George Reeves’ Superman.
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Nicolas Cage Almost Played Superman: The Story Behind the Movie That Never Happened
But Cage’s cameo as the Man of Steel marked his first-ever legitimate onscreen appearance as the hero, after Superman Lives was scrapped entirely before pre-production wrapped in ’99.
As previously reported, the movie was written by Kevin Smith, produced by Jon Peters and set to be directed by Tim Burton, with a plot featuring Superman squaring off against Lex Luthor, Brainiac and Doomsday. Clark Kent didn’t return to theaters until 2006’s Superman Returns.
“If you really wanted to know what I was going do with that character, look at my performance in City of Angels,” Cage told USA Today.
“I was supposed [to play] Clark Kent after that, and I was already developing this alien otherness playing this angel,” he added. “That is a perfect example of the tonality you would’ve gotten for Kal-El and for Clark Kent: Clark would’ve been a little more amusing but Kal-El [had] the sensitivity and the goodness and the vulnerability and all those feelings that were kind of angelic and also terrifying.”
Cage, who even named one of his sons Kal-El after Superman’s birth name from his home planet Krypton, was “absolutely wonderful” to work with on The Flash, director Andy Muschietti previously told Esquire Middle East. “He is a massive Superman fan. A comic book fanatic… Although the role was a cameo, he dove into it.”
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As for Superman Lives, Cage previously told Variety in March that “it was more of a 1980s Superman with, like, the samurai black long hair. I thought it was gonna be a really different, sort of emo Superman, but we never got there.”
“They wanted [director] Renny Harlin to do the movie,” he continued. “But I thought if I’m going to do this, it’s such a bullseye to hit … I said, this has to be Tim Burton. I called Tim and said, ‘Would you do this?’ Tim didn’t cast me, I cast Tim, and Tim said yes. I loved what he did with Michael [Keaton] and Batman, and I was a big fan.”
Cage’s Superman never came to fruition because Burton’s 1996 flick Mars Attacks wasn’t enough of a box office hit, he previously shared. “They were scared at the studio because of Mars Attacks. Warner Bros. had lost a lot of money on the movie. These movies that are really weird, that challenge and break ground, they piss a lot of people off. I think they got cold feet.”
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