David Corenswet, the new Superman, covers GQ Hype. Can I admit something? Still photos of Corenswet sort of leave me cold. He’s a nice-looking guy, but in photos, I’m always sort of shocked by how average he looks. But in motion? A million times better. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about Corenswet so this GQ profile was a nice primer. He’s a theater geek from Pennsylvania and he sounds pretty humble and grounded.

Corenswet immediately had doubts about playing Superman: “A role like Superman seems like something that everybody would want, and that’s not true. There are some people who wouldn’t want that role and who would, if given the opportunity, say no. I am obviously not one of those people. But I certainly tried to think of reasons not to. Most great things in life come with tradeoffs, even if it’s just something like having a lot of trouble [dealing with] being recognizable in public. You can’t think about it in too much specific detail because you don’t know what it’ll really look like for you, or whether it’ll happen. Who knows? Maybe nobody will recognize me.”

He avoids Hollywood: He lives just outside of Philadelphia, near the same small-town Pennsylvania stomping grounds where he grew up and developed a love for acting as a child in plays like Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. He was also inspired by his late father, “a theater actor in New York who never really made his living doing it particularly, but just had a great love of the traditions,” Corenswet says. “He was trying to make a career of it, but he didn’t find enough success for it to be able to sustain a family. And so, when he wanted to have a family, he decided to do the sensible thing and become a lawyer. And that’s what I was going to do, too, if I wasn’t able to establish something at a certain point.” It was starting a family of his own that brought Corenswet back from the last couple years living in LA, or as he describes it, “an expensive place to keep my stuff.”

He’s not riddled with anxiety: “I don’t know whether there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t really feel the pressure—which is not to say that I feel like I know what’s going to happen. But the pressure that I feel is the pressure to show up for James [Gunn] and deliver for him. If I had any religious upbringing, it was probably a Buddhist upbringing, sort of a Tibetan Buddhist. Not in a religious sense at all, basically just mindfulness meditation. My family went to a mindfulness retreat center every summer for a week.”

Superman is not an angst-ridden character: “There are things you have to hit about Superman that are indelible to the character. The things we’re aiming for are the things that are truest and therefore most interesting about Superman, the things that set him apart from other heroes. The fact that he is essentially free from angst and turmoil internally. He’s a good guy who had a great upbringing, loving parents, has wonderful relationships with his friends, and a romantic relationship, and loves what he does. He doesn’t have the Batman thing of having lost his parents early and doesn’t feel the burden of this terrible city that he has to come and save. Metropolis is a wonderful, cosmopolitan almost utopia—it just happens to get invaded by Kaijus and other monsters and whatnot every now and then.”

Whether “Clark Kent” is just a character created by Superman: “This was one thing that James said early on. Which is that we all have multiple characters that we play depending on the setting that we’re in. So, it’s not quite true to say that there’s a third person, but I think the true person, the character without pretense, is somewhere between Clark and Superman. And they’re both roles that he plays.”

[From GQ]

I like the answer about whether “Clark Kent” is a character created by Superman, a la the infamous Kill Bill speech. It’s important to remember that he was raised by Ma and Pa Kent and given those midwestern values, and yeah, Clark AND Superman are not angsty rebels without a cause. It’s also a pleasure to read a profile of an actor who wears all of this lightly – it’s become such a trope for actors to emphasize their “struggle” or how they take all of this (including themselves) way too seriously.

Cover courtesy of GQ, additional photo courtesy of Avalon Red.