Dean Cain Shares Insight At Mid-Ohio Con

Dean Cain told a panel at Wizard World’s Ohio Comic Con, Sept. 28-30, that he never gets tired of his association with Superman and Clark Kent, the characters he portrayed for four seasons on ABC’s Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the early 1990s.
“Clearly Clark Kent is the favorite role I’ve ever had,” Cain said. “Superman is the greatest American icon there is. To be able to play that is amazing. To be known as that character is great.”
He added that he admires the character’s morality. “To me he’s the most heroic of all the super-heroes.”
Dean was among several media guests, along with Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation, X-Men), Val Kilmer (Batman Forever, Top Gun, Tombstone), and Eliza Dushku (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) at the three-day pop culture convention held in Columbus.
Cain acknowledged that he might be more resentful of his association with the character if it had prevented him from getting other work but that that hasn’t been the case. He also pointed out other actors who are indelibly associated with the characters they’ve portrayed. “Alan Alda is always going to be Hawkeye to me, and that’s OK. I have the people who consider me Superman. I’ll take it.”
About fellow screen Supermans, Cain said he took inspiration from Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Superman in the movie series and from George Reeves, in the original 1950s Adventurers of Superman television show for Clark Kent.
He said that Reeve, who “set the bar very high” for the character, would have been the greatest guest star to have on Lois & Clark and regretted that he never had the opportunity meet him before he died in 2004.
Cain, who was raised by his stepfather who he said guided his own morality, enjoyed exploring the character through the interaction with his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, as played by Eddie Jones and K Callan, an aspect that hadn’t been explored previously. “You take the most powerful being on the planet and give him small-town American values, it’s a great, really strong story. To be able to see him in those moments, for me that was the heart of the character without a doubt,” he said. “When a kid sits there and watches the show, like my own son, watches it and watches the parents guiding Superman, if you will, it’s really strong. It’s a strong message.”
Cain, who said he is looking forward to Henry Cavill in 2013’s Man of Steel, praised Brandon Routh’s performance in 2006’s Superman Returns, though not the film itself. “He did a great job in that film, as best he could do in that film,” Cain said, but faulted elements like Superman not raising his own child. “Superman is not an absentee father. I just could not get past that,” he said.
His own son, who previously had resisted watching Cain’s Lois & Clark DVDs, recently began watching reruns of the series on The Hub network and told his father, “‘Dad, this is pretty good.’”
After a decade of playing Clark Kent on Smallville, Tom Welling “needs to take like six years off,” he said. “He’s probably still exhausted.”
Beyond Lois & Clark, Cain, a history major in college, said he enjoyed working on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not series. Among the artifacts he has handled on the show, his favorite was a backup Derringer carried by President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, that fell out of his pocket, “one of the most amazing things I’ve ever held in my hand.”