The Flash: Nicolas Cage Admits His Superman Cameo Left Him “Perplexed”

Last year’s The Flash finally brought Nicolas Cage to life as Superman, but the actor himself recently reflected on how his final appearance left him “perplexed” about his time actually being involved in the production. For decades, fans have only earned a few glimpses of how Cage would have looked in Tim Burton’s scrapped Superman Lives, though the multiversal nature of The Flash delivered the closest we’ll ever get to seeing the actor as the Man of Steel in an official project. However, with a majority of the sequence utilizing CGI, Cage admitted to his overall bewilderment about that experience.

“I wasn’t upset, I was just perplexed. I was just like, ‘It wasn’t what I shot,’ and I was worried about it,” Cage shared with Deadline. “Like, ‘Did you just tell me that I was witnessing the destruction of the universe so you could take pictures of me and then animate me?’ Whether it was through CGI or AI, that wasn’t the conversation we had. So I was confused.”

While Cage didn’t specifically detail what he filmed for The Flash, the finished sequence sees his version of the character grappling with a massive spider, making good on rumors that this confrontation would have been seen in Superman Lives. Even if the final version of the sequence is different from Cage’s firsthand experience, he revealed that the visual effects did somewhat work in favor of the sequence.

“But I was still happy to look at it. I still wanted to see Colleen Atwood’s suit, which I maintain is a beautiful suit, and 50% of that [character] was my design,” the actor expressed. “I wanted Superman to have the long, kind of black Samurai hair and a vulnerable feeling — almost no blinking, a stillness in his eyes. And so it was 50/50. It was Tim and myself, we had designed something, and it never came to light, so when I saw it moving, I was very happy that Andy Muschietti wanted me to do it. I did get some satisfaction from seeing the character, but to me it didn’t look [right]. But then, Superman is an alien. Kal-El is from another planet. So in that way, the CGI kind of looked right, because it’s alien. It doesn’t look real. It doesn’t look like it has a heartbeat. So I can look at it that way and think that it worked.”

With James Gunn set to kick off a new DC franchise, David Corenswet is set to take the reins of the character for the foreseeable future.

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