Brendan Fraser revealed that he once auditioned to be Superman in a canceled film.
Fraser told Josh Horowitz during an interview on his Happy Sad Confused podcast that he was almost cast as the Man of Steel. He recalled doing a screen test for a potential Superman film by JJ Abrams and Brett Ratner. The superhero adaptation unfortunately never made it to production as Warner Bros. decided to move forward with Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns instead.
However, Fraser admitted that he wasn’t sure if he would have been the right fit for the role for the project in the first place. The Mummy actor explained how it would have been a lot of pressure to take on such an iconic role, and being the face of such a huge franchise would require a lot of commitment.
The actor also expressed the anxiety that he most likely would have faced if he had played the Man of Steel in a film. He added that there was a part of him that feared he would only be known as Superman and nothing else if he got the role. He made it clear that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be known as one of the most iconic superheroes of all time, but he was unsure if he wanted that to be a part of his brand.
You feel a little certain anxiety anyway when you’re going up on some big job,” he said, “but I also remember thinking: ‘If I do get this job, then, well, I think Superman’s gonna be chipped on my gravestone.’ There’s an element of, you are that for the rest of your days, your career. And that’s not a bad thing; I’m not saying it’s gonna kill me any time soon, but it is something that becomes part of your entire brand, who you are. And I don’t know if I was ready to take that on then. I mean, I felt I was because [it was a] big opportunity, and excitement, et cetera, et cetera.
Although the untitled film never came close to seeing the light of day, Fraser said that he felt very connected to the script. It even strangely reminded him of a Shakespeare play. “I loved that screenplay. They let me read it. They locked me in an empty office in some studio lot, I signed an NDA. It was printed black on crimson paper, so you couldn’t photocopy it or sneak it out the door inconspicuously. I mean, it was Shakespeare in space. It was a really good screenplay,” he explained.
As for Abrams’ superhero ventures, in 2021, reports surfaced that he was working on a Superman film with novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Although story details regarding the upcoming movie are still under wraps, their version of Clark Kent will be set in a different timeline and unrelated to James Gunn’s iteration of the character.
