James Gunn says there were massive arguments over whether to call Superman a pussy
Gunn says the argument—over whether Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner would use "wuss" or "the p-word" to describe the Man Of Steel—was the film's biggest fight.
Is Superman a pussy? Enlightened minds may disagree!
This, per an interview that Superman writer/director/producer/all-purpose PR man James Gunn gave to Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, marking something like the end of his press tour odyssey promoting the film. Gunn, never the most taciturn guy, spoke openly about the battles waged while making the film—including what was apparently a pretty epic back-and-forth over whether Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner would end up telling David Corenswet’s Man Of Steel “Don’t be such a pussy” at a key moment in the script. (In the finished film, Fillion says “wuss,” instead.)
Gunn describes the arguments that broke out over the word—which would have had Corenswet’s Big Blue Boyscout chastise Gardner for the harsh language, apparently provoking a massive laugh from test audiences—as the biggest of the fights that came up during the movie’s extensive edits. (The second-biggest: The decision of how to resolve one of the movie’s weirder plotlines, Jimmy Olsen’s reluctant rekindling of a relationship with selfie-shooting whistleblower Eve; Skyler Gisondo was reportedly asked to deploy a whole range of facial expressions when reacting to Sara Simpaio hugging him at the end of the movie, from happy acceptance to “staring into the void.”) Gunn mostly seems amused by the debates, but also makes it clear that they were real, genuine arguments. (See also a fight about whether to showcase Superman saving a squirrel in the midst of a massive kaiju fight; some people in test audiences really did not like the squirrel rescue.)
But while he mostly restrained himself to comments about the movie itself—including jokingly referring to Corenswet as his personal Krypto and “prodigal son,” after he and the actor went back and forth frequently over how to handle certain pivotal scenes—Gunn did venture into a bit of wider DC drama. Most interestingly, that includes addressing the moment when he and fellow DC Studios head Peter Safran had to bring Henry Cavill in to tell him he wasn’t Superman anymore. Which was a conversation made a lot more awkward by the fact that Cavill had, literally on the day that Gunn and Safran had closed their deals to take over the studio (with a plan for a fresh, younger Superman in their pockets) stated on social media that he’d been given the green light by Warner Bros. to say he was coming back to the character after a multi-year absence. (Gunn, a diplomat, never mentions Black Adam star Dwayne Johnson by name here, but does note, with a wry expression, that there was a “vacuum” at Warner Bros. that meant certain people were trying to “force their way.”) Gunn calls the whole thing a “bummer” for Cavill, and reiterates what was said back in 2022, i.e., that he’d love to cast the actor somewhere else in the wider DCU.
As we’ve noted before, one of the genuinely enjoyable things about Gunn being in such a position of power at the moment is that he’s even freer to speak his mind than usual, and the HSC interview is a great example of how candid the man can get. (He claims to have genuinely not noticed any parallels between Superman’s travails at the hands of internet trolls and his own well-documented ones, for instance, and details a scene so darkly funny, between Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor and Zlatko Burić’s Vasil Ghurkos, that he knew it had to be cut basically as soon as he saw it in the edits—but still can’t help but break down laughing as he describes it.)
