In a special press conference for Supergirl, invited media watched DC Studios head James Gunn, director Craig Gillespie, and star Milly Alcock discuss the trailer that dropped today. The creative team behind the film broke down what they could talk about from the trailer and teased what to expect when Kara Zor-El’s journey comes to the big screen in June.
For Gillespie, who’s known for films that tackle darkly comedic complex characters—notably Cruella and I, Tonya—knowing he’d have the support to let Kara’s raw story be told thanks to Gunn and Safran taking over DC Studios got him to come in for Supergirl.
“I was very interested because I love James’s work. I love the tone. I feel a kinship there with a sensibility with what I like to do and what James has done,” he shared. “And the idea that they were going to now take over the studio felt like a huge opportunity.”
Alcock affirmed that sentiment. She was approached to audition thanks to her work as the young Rhaenyra Targaryen on House of the Dragon, which prepared her to join the party of two lone royal Kryptonian survivors. “Supergirl, compared to Superman, she’s had a completely different upbringing. She was brought up on a planet that was dying. Everyone that she’s ever known and loved is dead,” she shared. “She’s got a very big wall up and she’s very skeptical of people. And Clark is the opposite of that. He’s very overtly trusting. He expects the good in people. He’s had a very sheltered life, and he’s also pretending. Kara never pretends. If she’s not feeling well, you will know.”
Kara’s sense of agency—and seeing people on set moved to tears by the sight of her in costume—inspired Alcock to go all in. “Not only for myself, but for all of the people who’ve spent years of their [lives] trying to get this film up and made, and what it will mean to other young girls and other young women coming to see this movie,” she said. “Because I think she’s so flawed, and I think we really need a flawed hero.”
Alcock and Kara truly felt like the perfect combo for the filmmakers. Gillespie explained, “There’s a real punk quality to it, and Milly just embraced all of it. It’s so effortless for her to dive into that role and do it with a certain sense of compassion underneath, but you can feel the vulnerability; you can feel the fractures in what she’s struggling with, but she still has a toughness to it. And it’s a tricky dance.”
The range really suited Ana Nogueira’s take on Tom King’s source material, Gillespie added. “The adaptation of that was just so beautifully done. And honestly, I read the first two scenes of the film and the extremes of what is happening—it encompasses the whole movie.”
Without giving too much away, he described how the weight on Kara’s shoulders differs from her cousin Superman’s motivations. “The script really went to some hard and difficult places for the character, for the audience, and really has a lot of soul-searching involved and surprises you with the dark places that it ends up landing in. And I was very excited that we wouldn’t have to shy away from that.”
Alcock emphasized, “I think that what Supergirl represents for young women, especially, is that you can be flawed,” she said. “And you don’t have to be perfect in order to come to some internal self-resolution. I think that we’re kind of [thrust into] this narrative, especially women, that you have to be perfect in every aspect of your life. And I think that Kara is someone who so beautifully leans into her flaws. And I think that’s really special.”
Gunn jumped in. “That’s really what spoke to me, both in the book and in the script, is that a lot of times for some reason, our female superhero leads are just so much more perfect than our male [ones].”
In Supergirl, Gunn said, we’ll be “seeing somebody who was just so imperfect and such a mess but just really a beautiful soul.”
That’s what really got him and DC Studios co-head Peter Safran to give it the green light: the chance to follow Kara’s reluctant space odyssey because of “how she chases not being heroic. It is fun watching the movie because she’s going in and out of these planets with red planets and yellow planets. Superman’s powers [and] Supergirl’s powers don’t work on a red planet. They’re just ordinary human beings.”
Gillespie posited, “I think it’s the fact that she’s an antihero. What I loved in the story is she doesn’t want the role. When we meet her, she’s, in a very hard way, running away from it and in her own space. And she gets dragged very reluctantly into the world of having to be a superhero.”
The director shared how that influenced his vision of not only capturing Alcock’s performance of Kara’s emotional inner world, but also how it manifests through her physicality fighting. “Where she is in the story dictated a lot of how these fight sequences go. So if she’s in a very angry place, it’s going to be a much more frenetically messy, aggressive kind of camera work. If she’s feeling in the zone, so to speak, the camera work gets more fluid.”
His work has led up to this, he said. “There’s been this consistency of outsiders as leads that I’m attracted to and underdogs, and Supergirl is all of that. And she doesn’t want to take on the role. She’s got a lot of demons that she’s dealing with. So from a character standpoint, I really related to it. I think she’s doing everything not to be Supergirl.”
Alcock believes that Kara finds the reason to love being Supergirl in the last act, and it’s a journey she’s excited to share with audiences: “She doesn’t want to be a hero until the end of the movie, and then she’s like, ‘I have to be this.’”
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Sabina Graves
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