Years before Riverdale star KJ Apa crashed his car and revitalized a conversation about actor safety on the Vancouver sets for Warner Bros. TV‘s productions, members of the Smallville cast banded together to get series star Tom Welling a driver and prevent a similar event.
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Warner Bros. TV policy makes actors responsible for their own transportation to and from the set on international productions, including The CW‘s raft of comic book adaptations, which film in Canada — and at least when Smallville was in production, they apparently did not allow actors to have drivers on site. A recent, Smallville-themed episode of actor Michael Rosenbaum‘s Inside of You podcast explored the controversy… days before they could have known it would spring back up today.
“All of us are driving an hour to the location at 4:30 in the morning with one eye open, and you’re in every scene,” Rosenbaum said to his longtime co-star Tom Welling. “I think it got to a point where we all signed a letter for you because we were like ‘You’re going to kill Superman.’”
Welling said that he was not involved in that conversation, but that he was informed after the letter had already been written that Rosenbaum and John Schneider (who played Jonathan Kent on the show) had organized the cast to advocate for him.
“I was getting up at 4:30, driving an hour and a half, working an 18-hour day, then driving back, and you guys were like ‘Well, he’s going to die, he’s going to crash into a tree, and the show’s going to be over,’” recalled Welling.
At the time, the cast apparently won Welling’s right to have a driver by surrendering their own contractual rights that said if one actor got that treatment, everyone else had to have it as well.
“There was so much going on that early, and I had no idea what I was doing,” Welling said. “There were things that happened on that show, and because I had zero experience, I just accepted them for reality. Whether it was the hours or the locations we were shooting in… and I remember you being like ‘Dude, it’s not supposed to be like this.’”
Welling is currently back in the WBTV/DC Entertainment family, appearing on Fox’s Lucifer. Rosenbaum crossed party lines and is currently appearing in the Guardians of the Galaxy film franchise as Martinex.
Riverdale‘s production schedule will not be interrupted by Apa’s crash, since the star was unhurt. The show returns on October 11th at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
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