Not a lot of people saw The Flash, the much-hyped solo superhero outing whose anticlimactic underperformance all but put the final nail in the DCEU coffin. (There is still a second Aquaman en route, though.) Those that did got to see a stunning sight: Nicolas Cage as Superman. Or maybe they didn’t. The cameo is very brief — so brief that the star himself joked that he almost missed it himself.
In an interview with USA Today (in a bit caught by The Hollywood Reporter), Cage was asked about his semi-surprise appearance in the first and almost certainly final big screen outing for Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen. The appearance is a nod to Superman Lives, the aborted attempt in the late ‘90s to bring Clark Kent back to the big screen, which got so far that Cage actually got to wear the suit. So what did he think of finally seeing himself as Supes.
“Well, I was glad I didn’t blink,” Cage joked. He elaborated, though. “For me, it was the feeling of being actualized. Even that look for that particular character, finally seeing it on screen, was satisfying. But as I said, it’s quick.”
Cage even hinted at what his take on Kal-El — the name he gave his son, incidentally — would have been like.
“If you really wanted to know what I was going do with that character, look at my performance in City of Angels,” he said, referring to the loose remake of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire from 1998.
Cage has opened up about the failure of Superman Lives before, which was to be directed at one point by Tim Burton and would feature at one point a battle with a giant spider. Back in 2015 he said it’s a good thing it never got off the ground.