Dean Cain:
Humanizing Superman

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Dean Cain: Humanizing Superman

     “We have about 18 different projects that we are trying to get on air,” Cain says of ADE. “It is really difficult to get a show on TV. We are pitching just about every kind of show." Among them were made-for-TV action films, dramas and a number of reality shows. “I am not a huge fan of reality shows, but they're cheap to produce and there's still a big demand for them.”

     In August of 1998, while Cain was trying to breathe new life into his acting career, his year-long engagement to Mindy McCready died. Cain buried himself in work. After a pair of TV movies (Dogboys (1998) and Futuresport (1998)) his career seemed to regain traction with starring roles in a half dozen genre films including Broken Hearts Club (2000), No Alibi (2000), Flight of Fancy (2000), Militia (2000) and For the Cause (2000, released as Final Encounter in 2002).

     In 1999 Cain began seeing Samantha Torres, a Spanish model and actress who had been Playboy's Miss December 1995. Their son was born on June 11, 2000. Cain named him Christopher Dean Cain after his stepfather whom he calls “the most wonderful father in the world.” Cain's relationship with Torres ended soon after Christopher's birth. They agreed to a divided custody arrangement in which meaning Christopher lives with each in alternating months.
Brooke Mindy
Sam
Model Brooke Shields (upper left) was Cain's Princeton girlfriend, country singer Mindy McCready (upper right) was Cain's fiancée and Playboy model Samantha Torres is the mother of his son Christopher.


     Christopher's birth had a settling effect on Dean Cain's life. “I am lucky,” he said in 2003. “I've avoided the celebrity pitfalls because I have a three and a half year old son. I am a single father. I just don't have time.” Teaching Christopher to swim in the hotel pool is his favorite memory from his month-long stay in Miami while filming Out of Time (2003), a hard-edged crime drama in which he plays a despicable retired pro-football star opposite Denzel Washington's corrupt cop.

     “That is a wonderful compliment,” Cain replied when told just how creepy he played his character. “As an actor, you get pigeon-holed, they know you as the tights and the cape, and that's it. To play a character like Superman — he doesn't sweat, he was always one step ahead; he has no flaws. It's not human really. But to play a character with flaws that is human.”

     “Dean brought the goods when he came into the audition,” said director Carl Franklin. “You see an edge in him that a lot of people are not aware is there. His performance in the film is exciting to watch.”

     The struggle to be seen as a human being is one that had consumed Dean Cain for a decade since the cancellation of Lois & Clark. In that regard Cain is helped by the fact that he is in fact no longer a golden boy but a single father living with three dogs and, at 38, approaching middle age. The loss of that glowing image of youthful perfection is cause for exultation, in Cain's mind. He relished even the scruffy bearded look he nurtured for Out of Time.

     “It aged me,” he says. “During the nine months that I had the beard I could walk down the street and nobody would even recognize me. It was pretty liberating.”

     It was a big step in Cain's struggle to liberate himself from playing an endless succession of cardboard heroes in movies like Gentle Ben (2002) and Christmas Rush (2002). He took another big step toward that liberation with the role of Scott Peterson in the TV docudrama The Perfect Husband (2004). Cain portrays a husband who, while claiming innocence, may be the embodiment of evil if, as many suspect, he is guilty of the murder of his wife and unborn child. It's the mirror image of the Clark Kent/Superman duality in which Cain invested the prime years of his acting career.

     “We told the story based on the facts we knew on [Peterson],&rdquo says Cain. “He portrayed himself as innocent, so that's how I played him, but he did a lot of things that made you believe that he was guilty.”



     Yet at least for public consumption Dean Cain denies that he is making an effort to distance himself from the Superman role.

     “As an actor, you try to find interesting, complex, challenging roles, and it just turned out that the last two have been bad guys,” he insists. “I'm not consciously making a decision to play bad guys. It's just it's been two in a row now.”

     Cain's reluctance to own up to wanting to move away from the Superman image is understandable. That image may not have landed him the kinds of roles that inspire Oscar performances, but it has kept him busy with several paying gigs each year in family-oriented action-adventure movies. Trying to keep those jobs coming while broadening his dynamic range will be one of Cain's major preoccupations for the next decade.

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“He portrayed himself as innocent, so that's how I played him, but he did a lot of things that made you believe that he was guilty.”