James Gunn’s DC reboot has quietly settled on a casting philosophy: hire performers who will disappear into the machinery rather than stars who merely lend a face. David Corenswet bulked up to fill the cape, Nicholas Hoult shaved his head to become Lex Luthor, and now Adria Arjona — one of the most in-demand character actors of her generation — says the physical toll of entering that universe has been unlike anything her career had asked of her before. In a franchise built on the iconography of the invulnerable body, the studio is betting that the transformation is the performance.

Promoting her summer turn in A24’s Onslaught, Arjona let slip just how demanding the preparation has been. “I have muscles that I’ve never had in my life,” she told Deadline, describing a regimen that reshaped her for a part Gunn’s team still refuses to identify. The secrecy is deliberate; the physical evidence is not. A role that requires that kind of overhaul is unlikely to be a cameo or a bystander.

Arjona has spent recent years assembling exactly the profile DC now prizes. She broke through as Bix Caleen in Andor, Star Wars’ most adult and politically serious corner, then held the screen opposite Glen Powell in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man before cementing indie credibility as an A24 lead. She is less a blockbuster import than a prestige one — the same lane that carried Rachel Brosnahan from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to Lois Lane.

The sequel picks up after Gunn’s Superman, forcing the Man of Steel and a freshly humiliated Lex Luthor into an uneasy alliance against Lars Eidinger’s Brainiac. It anchors the DC Universe’s first full theatrical year, and Gunn has been methodical about seeding it with actors who can carry weight beyond a single outing. On the training evidence alone, Arjona’s undisclosed character reads like someone built to fight rather than to react.

Man of Tomorrow has already wrapped principal photography and opens on July 9, 2027 — which means the muscles Arjona is describing are already on the screen, welded to a name DC is content to keep secret for another eleven months.

Tags: casting, James Gunn, DC Studios, Adria Arjona, Man of Tomorrow