David Corenswet, the actor who made Superman earnest and now plays the NFL’s last pick

David Corenswet

Photo: U.S. Embassy in the Philippines / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 8, 1993 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Superman, Pearl, Twisters
Awards	Critics' Choice

Face-down in the snow at the start of Superman, beaten and bleeding, David Corenswet’s Clark Kent does the least heroic thing available to him: he whistles for his dog. The moment tells you what James Gunn hired him for. Corenswet plays a Superman who is decent on purpose and a little embarrassed about it, and audiences took that sincerity at face value. The difficulty is what comes after. A part that size swallows whatever an actor does next, and the projects he has lined up before the cape returns look chosen with that problem in mind: a football player picked dead last, and a play about grown children who misread their parents.

Performance runs through the family, though rarely in a straight line. His father, John Corenswet, came from a Jewish family in New Orleans and spent years as a stage actor in New York before he turned to law, the profession his mother practices as well. The stranger inheritance is on his mother’s side: his grandfather is Edward Packard, the author who created the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which makes a tidy origin story for an actor whose career keeps arriving at forks in the road.

Corenswet was born in Philadelphia on July 8, 1993, and grew up there and in suburban Lower Merion. He was working on professional stages as a child, in an Arden Theatre production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and a Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival staging of Macbeth. After the Shipley School he spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to the Juilliard School, where he earned a drama degree in 2016.

The years around Juilliard were scrappy and self-made. He wrote and starred in a small feature, Following Chase, and with his classmate Adam Langdon he co-created Moe & Jerryweather, a sketch-comedy web series that ran for two seasons. Rob Reiner cast him as a co-lead in The Tap, a pilot set at Yale in 1969; USA Network shot it and passed. What followed was the usual apprenticeship of guest spots on shows such as House of Cards and Elementary.

Ryan Murphy gave him his first real exposure, and his first typecasting. In the Netflix series The Politician he was River Barkley, the polished rival and secret love of Ben Platt’s Payton Hobart, whose death in the opening episode hangs over everything that follows. In Hollywood, Murphy’s rewrite of the postwar studio system, he played Jack Castello, a would-be leading man pumping gas at a station that fronts for sex work, and served as an executive producer. Yet both men exist mainly to be looked at and wanted by other people, and for a while that seemed to be all the industry wanted from him.

The correction came in supporting roles with less glamour attached. In HBO’s We Own This City, from David Simon and George Pelecanos, he played David McDougall, the real investigator whose work helped expose the Baltimore police unit known as the Gun Trace Task Force. In Ti West’s Pearl he was the projectionist who offers Mia Goth’s farm girl a glimpse of a wider life and pays dearly for it. Then came a storm chaser in Twisters and a part opposite Natalie Portman in the Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake. None was a lead. Each made him earn attention in a handful of scenes.

Superman had been on his mind for years. In a November 2019 interview he called the role his “pie-in-the-sky ambition” and said that, much as he admired the dark take of Man of Steel, he hoped someone would eventually make a bright, optimistic version. In June 2023 Gunn cast him in exactly that film, alongside Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor. Superman opened in July 2025, grossed $618.7 million worldwide and finished as the tenth highest-grossing film of the year, and reviewers who found it overstuffed still singled out its lead. In August 2026 the performance won him the Critics Choice Super Award for best actor in a superhero movie.

The figures carry a caveat. Roughly 57 percent of the gross came from North America, and the international opening was the weak spot of that first weekend, with analysts describing Superman as a character that has always been American-centric. The quality that sold the film at home, an uncynical decency, is the one that travelled least. Supergirl, in which he returned in a supporting role opposite Milly Alcock in June 2026, then opened below expectations to divided reviews. That leaves more of the new DC Universe resting on his Superman, and on a version of the hero that audiences outside the United States have so far bought only in part.

His answer has been to go smaller. In Mr. Irrelevant, directed by Jonathan Levine from a script by Nick Santora, he plays John Tuggle, the New York Giants’ final pick in the 1983 NFL draft, who made the team against the odds and died of cancer at 25 in 1986. Michael Shannon, the General Zod of Man of Steel, plays the coach Bill Parcells. For a Philadelphian, a Giants uniform carries its own irony. Paramount releases the film in the United States on December 25, 2026.

Broadway follows. He makes his debut in a revival of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, directed by Anna D. Shapiro and co-starring François Arnaud and Yvonne Strahovski. He plays Walker, a son trying to decode his dead father, and in the second act Ned, that same father as a young man. Previews begin at the Longacre Theatre on January 30, 2027, ahead of a March 1 opening.

Off screen his life is quieter than the role suggests. He married Julia Best Warner in March 2023 at Immaculate Conception Church in New Orleans, in an interfaith ceremony led by a priest and a rabbi. Their daughter was born in 2024, and the family has since moved back to Pennsylvania. He has said he was raised Buddhist, “not in a religious sense,” with a week at a mindfulness retreat every summer.

The cape comes back on July 9, 2027, when Warner Bros. releases Man of Tomorrow, Gunn’s follow-up, in which Superman and Hoult’s Luthor are pushed into an alliance against Brainiac. By then Corenswet will have played a long shot who died at 25 and, eight times a week, both a son and the father that son never understood. Neither man looks anything like a superhero, which seems to be his argument: the decency audiences bought in Superman was craft, and he intends to keep proving it.

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Tags: actors, Ryan Murphy, James Gunn, Man of Tomorrow, David Corenswet, Superman

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