The Flash: Who Played Jay Garrick Revealed

By Russ Burlingame

When The Flash arrived in theaters last month, one of the big questions raised by the movie's "multiverse scene" was who had been tapped to play Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash. Appearing in a brief cameo, it's implied in the movie that Garrick was The Flash in the world of The Adventures of Superman, the 1950s TV series starring George Reeves. With one exception -- Nicolas Cage's Superman cameo -- each of the universes prominently featured in the sequence featured either The Flash, Supergirl, or Batman, so adding another superhero to the Reeves continuity kind of makes sense in the context of the scene.

What made less sense was the choice to use a total unknown actor to play Garrick. A new explanation has emerged, though, and it pretty simply explains how it happened: that's not an actor at all, but a member of the visual effects team. That clarifies some confusion that came up as a result of fans believing the movie featured a cameo by The Flash TV villain Teddy Sears.

"I mean… that looks like my likeness," Sears admitted to TVLine. "People kept telling me that I was in the new Flash movie....I mean, I'm sleep-deprived with a newborn at home, so my memory is a little foggy. But I'm pretty sure I would have remembered shooting a major DC Studios film."

TVLine confirmed with sources at Warner Bros. and Warner Bros. Television that the footage was not Sears, but rather a "generic Golden Age Flash representation played no actor of note," which...seemed harsh at the time. Prior to that article, another trade story had used the phrasing "generic Golden Age Flash representation," which led some fans to speculate that the movie's Jay Garrick might have been an AI construct, in which case Sears could have been part of the data set.

Editor Jason Ballantine explained the situation in an interview with frame.io Insider:

"there was a moment with [director Andy Muschietti] figuring out the Chrono Bowls and the revisiting to the different time periods, etc., and the Jay Garrick character, the black and white Flash, and Andy's conceptualizing that," Ballantine said. "He wanted that as one of the characters and quite large on screen. And then DJ, our visual effects supervisor, said, 'Well, if we're going to have a digital character that large on screen, then it would be better to have a real face just to help with the look of the shot.' And so I stuck my hand up, my arm nearly flew off my shoulder, to volunteer to have an opportunity to have my face stuck on the original Flash."

That line from visual effects supervisor John "DJ" Desjardin does seem to suggest there was discussion of making Jay a purely CG character, which lends a little credibility to the AI paranoia expressed at first, but the creatives didn't go that way, instead giving themselves a moment of digital immortality in the DC Universe. In the Chrono Bowl sequence, VFX crew members Paul Machliss and Desjardins also appear briefly, as mad scientists, according to Ballantine.

Ironically, the Frame.io story was published around the time The Flash came to theaters, and has just this week surfaced on Twitter, as somebody finally noticed this quote and called attention to it.

The Flash arrived on Digital platforms this week, promising to reshape the DC Multiverse with the help of familiar faces and brand-new heroes. Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) ventures to the past to change history, resulting in massive repercussions for the future. Forced to team up with another version of Barry, the mysterious Kryptonian known as Supergirl (Sasha Calle), and the iconic Batman (Michael Keaton), the Scarlet Speedster is forced to reckon with his mistakes and save a doomed reality. The Flash is directed by Andy Muschietti, written by Christina Hodson from a story by Joby Harold, and produced by Barbara Muschietti.

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