As soon as it was announced that Smallville star Tom Welling had agreed to return for a role in The CW‘s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover, fans wondered whether they might finally get a glimpse of the character in Superman’s costume. The answer, as it turned out, was no — and Welling told fans at a convention appearance recently that was the only way he would have agreed to do the cameo. In his scene, Welling’s Clark Kent is confronted by Jon Cryer’s Lex Luthor. When Kryptonite has no effect on Clark, it’s revealed that the hero had given up his powers in order to settle down and have kids with Lois Lane (Erica Durance).
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Welling admitted that before he got the call to appear in “Crisis,” he didn’t know what a multiverse was. After hearing the pitch, he paused for a long time, trying to think of a good reason to say no to what he ultimately decided was too good an idea to pass up.
“If they had started the conversation with ‘So, Clark is in the suit,’ I’d have been like [click],” Welling told an audience at Fan Expo Vancouver, motioning with his microphone as if it were a phone.
Welling said that he “liked the idea of [Clark] appearing again, and I liked the idea of him being with Lois.”
He added that he brought the influence of Smallville‘s John Schneider to the part, saying, “I don’t know if anybody picked up on this, but somehow I got in the back of my head that I wanted to act more like Jonathan Kent, in that scene than I did Clark, because that’s his father, and that’s probably who he would have been influenced by.”
Welling was one of a handful of DC’s TV and film veterans to make an appearance in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” an adaptation of one of the most popular events in the publisher’s history. Besides Welling’s Clark Kent, the event saw the return of Brandon Routh as Superman; Ashley Scott as The Huntress; John Wesley Shipp as The Flash; Kevin Conroy as Bruce Wayne; Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox; and Ezra Miller as The Flash. The story also brought Cress Williams’s Black Lightning into the Arrowverse proper and merged his world (as well as Supergirl’s Earth-38) with Earth-1 to make Earth Prime.
In addition to Smallville, Welling appeared in Lucifer, another DC adaptation, which is set to release its fifth season soon on Netflix. While that is nominally its final season, producers are reportedly in talks to bring it back for a sixth.
