In 2006, HBO’s Entourage built a running joke out of a fake blockbuster. Its fictional movie star lands the lead in an Aquaman film directed by James Cameron, who guest-starred as himself four separate times. The gag was the premise itself. A blockbuster about the guy who talks to fish was so obviously absurd that the only place it could exist was inside a comedy about Hollywood delusion. The show’s creator has since said he could not see any way that movie actually got made.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Twelve years later Jason Momoa made it for real and Aquaman grossed $1.15 billion, the highest-grossing DC film to that point, which is a well-told story. The one that rarely gets told is that between the joke and the billion, a studio got reportedly within weeks of shooting a movie in which Aquaman was a major character, and an actor even tried the costume on. His name is Santiago Cabrera, and nineteen years later he still has not played a superhero.
Why Only One Actor Was Ever Cast as a Movie Aquaman Before Momoa
The film was Justice League: Mortal, and its director makes the whole thing stranger. Warner Bros. hired George Miller, the Australian filmmaker behind Mad Max, and by October 2007 he had assembled a cast few would have predicted: Armie Hammer as Batman, D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Adam Brody as the Flash, and the rapper Common as Green Lantern. The budget was $220 million, and costumes were being built at Wฤtฤ Workshop, the New Zealand effects house behind The Lord of the Rings.
Then it fell apart in three stages that usually get compressed into one. The Writers Guild strike began on November 5, 2007 and froze the script. When it ended, the Australian government denied the production a 40% tax rebate, ruling it failed the significant-Australian-content test, which stranded a film built around shooting in Australia. Miller said publicly that the policy left Australian filmmakers making small films nobody wanted to watch. Then The Dark Knight opened in July 2008, made a fortune with one hero and no shared universe, and Warner Bros. appears to have stopped needing a Justice League. The project was dead by August, reportedly with sets standing.
Cabrera’s casting has never been confirmed by Warner Bros., and the contemporaneous casting reports from October 2007 do not mention him at all. What exists is his own account, given in 2024, and he hedged it himself. “Technically, I was Aquaman in 2007 when the writer’s strike hit,” he said. Note the word technically. He did get further than a phone call, describing a trip to Wฤtฤ Workshop to try the costume on, which made the whole thing feel real for a moment. Then the lesson he took from it, which is the most useful thing any actor has said about this business: nothing is real until you are standing at the premiere talking about it.
Why Santiago Cabrera Still Doesn’t Count as a Superhero Actor
There is an obvious objection to make here, and it deserves an answer rather than a dodge. Cabrera spent two seasons on NBC’s Heroes, a series whose entire premise is ordinary people discovering superpowers, playing Isaac Mendez, a painter who could see the future in his own canvases. So how is that not a superhero?
Because Isaac never behaves like one. He wears no costume, takes no name, fights no crime, and saves nobody. He is a heroin addict who believed the drugs were what unlocked the visions, and his arc ends when the villain Sylar murders him and opens his skull to steal the power. He is a man a superpower happened to, which is the opposite of the job. The rest of the resume points the same way: Lancelot on Merlin, Aramis on The Musketeers, a starship captain on Star Trek: Picard. Plenty of genre, no cape. And he has said he would still take one if it came around again, with a preference for playing the villain.
The word “movie” is doing real work in all this. Aquaman had reached screens before, just never a cinema one. Alan Ritchson played a young Arthur Curry, Aquaman’s civilian name, on Smallville from 2005, and Justin Hartley shot a full Aquaman pilot for The WB in 2006 that the network passed on. Cabrera is the only actor attached to a theatrical version who never got to make it.
Check out Ritchson as Arthur Curry on Smallville:
Personally, the part that gets me is the timing, and the honest concession is that Justice League: Mortal might have made things worse. A $220 million movie with an Aquaman in 2009, the character still a national punchline, could have buried him for another decade. But Cabrera tried that suit on in 2007, when Entourage was openly treating a serious Aquaman movie as a joke about a delusional actor, and Momoa walked into the same character seven years later, after a decade of comics had rebuilt him, and cleared a billion dollars. Same trident, same ocean, completely different job. The variable was the decade.
The strangest part is where the character sits now. James Gunn has said he doubts Momoa’s Aquaman is canon in the rebooted DC Universe, the actor has moved over to Lobo, the cigar-chewing alien bounty hunter, and debuted in Supergirl in June 2026. No new actor has been announced for Aquaman. Which means that as of right now, the number of actors publicly attached to playing him in a movie is back to zero.
Aquaman and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are both streaming on HBO Max. Who should play the DCU’s Aquaman? Let us know in the comments.
More Movies
-
IMAGE COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. -
Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme
