Add Matt Bomer to the ranks of the nearly-Super. The Magic Mike XXL star has said that, like Nicolas Cage, Ashton Kutcher and Jude Law before him, he was once going to play Superman on the big screen.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Bomer said he was chosen to play the superhero by Brett Ratner. The director had been working on a version of the superhero story, scripted by JJ Abrams, that was doing the rounds in 2002.
Bomer says he auditioned “in the tights and everything” opposite a future Lois Lane, Man of Steel star Amy Adams. Other actors who were auditioning for the role at the time included Brendan Fraser and the late Fast & Furious star, Paul Walker.
Bomer says he was cast before Ratner left the project and he lost the part. Ratner had envisioned the film as the first of a trilogy and had reportedly offered Josh Hartnett $100m to star in all three films. Hartnett apparently turned down the offer four times, and has also said he refused to play both Batman and Spider-Man.
“It was a very lengthy process to get the role,” Bomer said. “It was over the course of three months. Then there was a month of: ‘OK. This is going to happen.’ And then it slowly fell apart.”
“I have zero regrets about that,” he said. “That’s a very iconic role to portray: to suddenly be that character in peoples’ minds forever.”
Abrams’s script was a Superman origins story featuring an evil super-uncle and Lex Luther as an alien-obsessed CIA agent. It was, according to Bomer, a much lighter take on the character compared to what the project eventually became: Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, which starred Brandon Routh as the son of Krypton.
The franchise has taken an even darker turn since, with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) setting up a gritty showdown between Superman and Batman in the planned sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
