In the mid-seventies, Superman was not just a character: he was DC’s goose that laid the golden eggs and a bet that could make or sink the first great modern superhero blockbuster. Producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind wanted a “serious” and grandiose film, far from the tone camp of the Batman of the sixties, but they also knew that any setback would be a historic embarrassment.
Too big to fail. In that scenario, DC, suspicious, imposed the strictest conditions and monitored the project as if it were a surgical operation, because the underlying problem was not making a movie: it was making it with a guy in tights and a red cape and getting the public to look at him with respect, not as a meme.
Two years of casting. Thus, the search for the perfect Superman became the great bottleneck: it began in 1975 and lasted until February 1977, with hundreds of tests and a growing sense of desperation. There was, as is often the case in any great production, a “wish list” of stars that seemed more like a festival poster than an audition: Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Charles Bronson, James Caan, or even Nick Nolte.
In fact, there were many more, in addition to proposals that today sound delirious due to pure marketing logic, such as thinking about Muhammad Ali or even people outside of acting. It turns out that each option failed for something (if it wasn’t cost, it was age, image, accent or fit in general) and the message was clear: without Superman, there was no movie.
The definitive twist. In the midst of that chaos, Christopher Reeve arrived from the New York theater as an answer that did not fit the cliché of the “big name” that the producers were looking for, but did fit the essence of the character. The casting director pushed her candidacy against the inertia of the team, until they finally gave her a real opportunity.
When Richard Donner, the film’s director, saw it, the judgment was as clear as it was uncomfortable: Reeve had the height, the face and the aura to be Superman… but he was also too young and too thin (“a stick,” were the director’s words) to fill a suit that required visible strength, not just presence. Even so, in that test (between nerves, heat from the spotlights and a still ungainly appearance) something was evident that no one could copy: the potential to make Clark Kent and Superman believable in the same person.
The actor before opting for his role in Superman
Stop being a “stick”. Reeve got the role with an unspoken demand that was actually an ultimatum: he had to physically become Superman, and do it quickly. The producers even suggested that he use fake muscles under the suit to “trick” the camera, a typical solution in cinema of the time, but he refused, because he understood that credibility was not built with padding, but with transformation.
The movie needed the body to say “superhero” before the character even spoke, and Reeve assumed that the job was not just to act well, but to look impossible without falling into excess.
Darth Vader as trainer. Here comes the anecdote that seems invented by an advertising department: the man inside the Darth Vader suit, David Prowse, also a bodybuilder and instructor, was the one in charge of sculpting Superman. Donner called it like someone activating an emergency plan: “we have a Superman” and we have to build it against the clock.
Prowse trained Reeve for weeks with a routine focused on gaining mass and functional strength, solid enough to withstand flight harnesses, strenuous days, and the character’s symbolic weight. And in the process a perfect story was born to sell the film: the most intimidating physical villain of the moment molding the definitive hero of the decade.
The “obsessive” transformation. The method was as simple as it was brutal: eat a lot, train thoroughly and not allow yourself to lose weight for a single day. Reeve put himself on a high-protein diet, with four meals a day, shakes and vitamins, and with an almost paranoid discipline: skipping a meal meant going backwards, and going back was a disaster.
The idea he repeated was very clear: the actor’s inner work is useless if the exterior does not support the fantasy, because Superman cannot “seem” weak, even if he is vulnerable on the inside. And the most interesting thing is that this physical strength also changed the psychology of the role: the stronger he became, the more natural the calm authority of the character came to him.
Too “handsome”. The result was so exaggeratedly effective that it became a continuity problem: Reeve continued to gain muscle during filming and there came a point where he was not the same body as in the first scenes. The production had to redo shots already filmed because the Superman of one day did not fit with the Superman of weeks later, and the suit, designed for a “before”, began to behave like a shell that was too small.
The ironic twist is that at first they wanted to put fake muscles under the uniform and, after the transformation, the opposite happened: they were able to remove the additions from the suit because they were no longer needed, and the film was left with what it had always needed from the beginning, a Superman with real muscle, without tricks or cardboard.
The myth that remained. Over time, Reeve’s physique has been compared to the hypertrophied standards of today’s superheroes, but at the time it was quite an event: his change from “tall, skinny actor” to muscular icon was part of Superman’s own story even before the premiere.
The important thing was not to compete with modern mountains of biceps, but to build an exact illusion: that this guy could be the most powerful on the planet and yet the most human when he looked at Lois Lane. In the end, his Superman not only worked because of Reeve’s charisma or performance (that too), but because the body stopped being an obstacle and became a test: if the suit could hardly contain him, the public had no reason to doubt it either.
Image | Warner
In WorldOfSoftware | How the best Batman in the history of cinema ended up devoured by his most implacable enemy: McDonald’s Happy Meals
In WorldOfSoftware | The best advertisement within a movie is this science fiction classic: it was so good that it made us doubt the Nazis
