Superman stars David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan said they had director James Gunn‘s ear when it came to creating the relationship between Clark Kent and Lois Lane.
Corenswet, Brosnahan and Gunn spoke with Blavity’s Managing Editor, Trey Mangum, about creating a Superman story that has already has Clark and Lois in the middle of their relationship.
“I was pleasantly taken aback that James hadn’t decided a bunch of stuff,” said Corenswet. “Oftentimes you have a writer who knows exactly what the characters have been going through before they show up. He had very strong ideas about certain things– we’re three months into their relationship, she knows his secret identity. But when it came to [us] as actors, we asked questions like, ‘How exactly did they meet?’ And James sort of started thinking, and so we got to think about that together and talk about it together. And as an actor, it’s nice to…be able to have some flexibility in that conversation …James was very excited about all that and we had some great conversations about it.”
Rachel Brosnahan on the ‘similar goals’ she and David Corenswet had with James Gunn
Brosnahan also said that she, Corenswet and Gunn have “similar ways of working.”
“While we have very similar goals…we sometimes have different approaches. And I think it was fun for us to be able to discover that as we were discovering these two characters. I remember us having a big conversation with James about how to win an argument, whether raising your voice won an argument or going low and quiet and pulling you in wins an argument. We felt very differently about that. The arguments [about characterization] were good on and off set.”
Not getting bogged down in Clark Kent’s origin story
Gunn added that he wanted audiences to quickly get into the dynamics of Lois and Clark’s relationship without getting bogged down in Clark’s origin from Krypton.
“There’s maybe five people in the world that don’t know that Superman came from Krypton on a rocket ship and was raised by farmers in Kansas. But for those five people who don’t know it, we put it in one sentence at the beginning of the movie,” he said. “But I know when I started reading comics as a kid, I entered Superman’s world, which was a world of Superman and other superheroes and giant monsters and robots and sorcery and flying dogs. And so I really wanted to enter into Superman’s…world. I thought that was the best thing for the film.”
Watch the full interviews with the Superman cast above. Superman comes to theaters on July 11.
