Time Off - THE SUPERMAN NEXT DOOR

David Corenswet prepares to don the cape of the most famous superhero of all time

- ELIANA DOCKTERMAN

THE NEW SUPERMAN, DAVID CORENSWET, resides not in Metropolis but a suburb of Philadelphia. He's close enough to the downtown train station that his commute to Manhattan, he claims, feels shorter than when he lived in Brooklyn as a struggling actor. We meet at the kind of diner with syrup and hot sauce on every table, on a quaint main street that ends, inevitably, at a Wawa convenience store.

It's an unusual home base for an actor on the precipice of a major breakthrough. Corenswet, 31, will play the lead in Superman, which hits theaters on July 11, the latest film to take on the most popular superhero of all time. He moved to Pennsylvania to be near family, and he's now raising a 1-year-old daughter there with his actor wife. Since movies now tend to shoot in Toronto or Atlanta, he doesn't feel the pull of New York or L.A. Actors, he says, can “get away with being anywhere as long as you have a nice self-tape setup for auditions.”

He's easy to spot as he walks in. Corenswet looks like, well, Superman. He stands at an imposing height, and a curling lock of hair falls in the middle of his forehead. Clad in a blue sweater and leather jacket with sunglasses tucked neatly into the collar, he asks the hostess if we can sit by the window, the first time in my years of interviewing celebrities that an actor hasn't requested a dark corner.

He's refreshingly neurotic, picking at his nails as he admits that, as a student at Juilliard, he sparred with professors. “Some teachers would say that I was difficult because I love a good argument,” he says, promising it wasn't born from stubbornness. “I'm happy to be wrong. I just want to be convinced.” Despite being told he was “too intellectual” and “too analytical” for Hollywood, he was swept into the Ryan Murphy universe, starring in the 2019 series The Politician and in 2020's Hollywood before leveling up to feature films: he played the bad guy in