David Corenswet plays decent men who want badly to be liked, and he lets us see what it costs them when they are not. It made him a Superman worth watching. In smaller parts it has so far left him handsome, kind and underused.
Fi1m perspective
Near the middle of Superman (2025), Clark Kent sits on a porch in Kansas with his adoptive father. There is no music. He says very little. What David Corenswet does instead is let the hurt sit on his face, and James Gunn holds the shot long enough for us to see it. We were moved more than we expected to be by a superhero film, and that scene was what did it: a large, capable man who has just found out he is not wanted, and who has no idea what to do about it.
That is his gift, as far as we have seen it. He is big and open-faced and he plays men who want to be liked, and he is good at the moment when they are not. His Superman is more interesting than the untroubled god we usually get because he bruises so easily. The long argument with Rachel Brosnahan's Lois on the sofa in her flat works for the same reason: she is quicker than him and knows it, and he knows it too and tries not to mind. Nobody flies. Nothing blows up. It is the best written scene in the film and he holds his end of it.
The career before that was mostly a matter of being noticed in other people's stories. He trained at Juilliard and then found leads in two Ryan Murphy series, The Politician (2019) and Hollywood (2020), heightened, period-dressed work that raised his profile. On film he has spent more time at the edge of the frame. In Ti West's Pearl (2022) he is the projectionist who shows Mia Goth's Pearl a film she should not see, a part written to say the things she needs to hear, and he has little to do but be handsome and kind about it. In We Own This City (2022), David Simon and George Pelecanos's Baltimore is crowded and he is one face in it. When Supergirl (2026) brought Superman back, he appeared and was polite, which is a fair account of what the script gave him.
The pattern is plain enough. Corenswet is at his best when a director lets him want something and then takes it away, and at his weakest when he is asked only to be agreeable, because agreeable is what he looks like before he has done anything. Gunn saw the difference. West, with a slighter part to fill, did not need to. In 2019, before anyone had asked him, he said that "my pie-in-the-sky ambition is definitely to play Superman." He got the part and he was the best thing in the film. The next test is whether somebody offers him a man who is not nice, or a nice man in a film that does not keep going back to the robots.
Biography
David Packard Corenswet is an American actor. He graduated from the Juilliard School with a BFA in drama in 2016. He began with guest roles in television series including House of Cards (2018) and Elementary (2012).
Corenswet played lead roles in the Netflix series The Politician (2019–2020) and Hollywood (2020). In 2022 he appeared in the films Look Both Ways and Pearl, and the HBO miniseries We Own This City. He played Scott in the film Twisters (2024) and the titular superhero in James Gunn's Superman (2025) and Supergirl (2026).
