The Flash: Nicolas Cage Reacts to His Superman Cameo

After 25 years, Nicolas Cage's Superman lives. When scarlet speedster Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) raced into the DC multiverse in The Flash film, fans got a glimpse at an alternate timeline where the Leaving Las Vegas star played a mulleted Superman who battles a giant spider. Long before he starred as Marvel's Ghost Rider or voiced Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Cage was set to play Kal-El/Clark Kent in Superman Lives, director Tim Burton and writer Kevin Smith's attempted — and later abandoned — resurrection of the then-dormant franchise in the 1990s.

"Well, I was glad I didn't blink. For me, it was the feeling of being actualized," Cage told USA Today when asked to describe what it was like seeing his live-action Superman on screen more than two decades after Warner Bros. scrapped Superman Lives. "Even that look for that particular character, finally seeing it on screen, was satisfying. But as I said, it's quick. If you really wanted to know what I was going do with that character, look at my performance in City of Angels."

In the 1998 romantic drama, Cage plays a guardian angel who weighs trading his otherworldly existence for a mortal life with a human woman (Meg Ryan). 

"I was supposed [to play] Clark Kent after [City of Angels], and I was already developing this alien otherness playing this angel. That is a perfect example of the tonality you would've gotten for Kal-El and for Clark Kent," Cage explained. "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."

Superman Lives got as far as location scouting before Warner Bros. killed the project, which Burton reworked with his Batman Returns script doctor Wesley Strick. Inspired by the Death of Superman and subsequent Return of Superman comic book arcs that spanned the '90s, the rewritten script presented the alien Kal-El — the last son of Krypton who was rocketed to Earth from his dying planet — as an existentialist.

The Flash wasn't Cage's first time playing Superman: he voiced the character in the DC animated movie Teen Titans Go! to the Movies.

"For the earliest part of my career, I made lots of nods to pop culture," Smith told ComicBook when reacting to Cage's Superman cameo in The Flash. "I can't tell you how happy it makes me at the point in my life whenever pop culture nods back at me. For all the times I ever told that Superman Lives story, it delighted me no end to hear it was echoed in The Flash." 

The Flash is now available to own or rent on digital.