Wondercon hosted the passing of the torch from one Superman to another. Henry Cavill appeared before fans to promote his pre-Man of Steel movie Immortals, and Brandon Routh brought his latest comic book movie Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. Routh and his Superman Returns costar Sam Huntington riffed with the press and each other behind the scenes in San Francisco.
It’s one comic book movie after another:
Brandon Routh: Which almost happened in succession with this movie. I filmed them the same year, kind of back to back basically. I filmed some of this, was kind of doing some preproduction for that as this was happening.
Real life best friends:
Brandon Routh: It’s amazing. We should make a movie of this.
Sam Huntington: Bring your cameras into my living room and watch us watch Amazing Race together.
Brandon Routh: Or America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Sam Huntington: That’s basically what we do. Seriously, Sam and Brandon and Wives Watch Reality TV on Sunday Night and Eat Indian Food. That’s about it. That’s the window into our lives right there.
Real life is the sequel to Superman Returns:
Sam Huntington: That’s where we became friends.
Brandon Routh: We did actually meet, oh my Lord. We were neighbors and we didn’t know it.
Sam Huntington: In the same apartment complex in L.A. we played basketball together. Literally at least a year later, I remember going in.
Brandon Routh: You were the one that remembered.
Sam Huntington: I looked at pictures of you online after I heard you got the job. Obviously he was cast much before I was but I think it was literally my first costume fitting when I remembered, “Oh, you know what? I know him. I know that guy. I even played basketball with that guy, very badly ”.
Brandon Routh: “He dunked on me.”
Sam Huntington: That man dunked on me.
Brandon Routh: I didn’t, I didn’t.
The big question: Have they crossed paths with Henry Cavill?
Sam Huntington: Oh, I didn’t see him.
Brandon Routh: Haven’t seen him.
Sam Huntington: No, we don’t need to see him.
Brandon Routh: Down, down, Sam.
Sam Huntington: I’m sure he’s a lovely gentleman.
How to shop for your zombie:
Sam Huntington: New parts. New body parts. So it’s like if your arm rots off, which happens, you can go buy a new arm or eyes or scalps or just really anything. They call it a chop shop. It’s a pretty original idea and it’s Beetlejuice-esque. That’s how we play it.
Brandon Routh: People that have perished from the morgue. There are zombies that work in the morgue so they re-appropriate.
Sam Huntington: It’s recycling. It’s zombie recycling. It’s the green way.
Brandon Routh: Or maybe they dig up graves and get them later too.
Sam Huntington: Either way it really works.
One guy thinks Dylan Dog is cooler than Superman:
Brandon Routh: I actually was aware of Dylan Dog because I have a friend, my friend Garrett, who lived in Italy for seven years. His parents worked over there so he grew up as a teenager there reading Dylan Dog just like any other normal Italian would. So when I met him after he’d come back from there, he told me about this comic he used to read all the time and showed me the hundreds of volumes that he had of it. So when the script came to me, the name rung a bell and I called him up. I was like, “Dylan Dog, isn’t that the comic that you were telling me about?” He’s like, “Yeah, if you did this movie, it’d be cooler for me than Superman” because that was a bigger deal for him growing up there. He’s actually in the movie. He plays a zombie in a restaurant.
There’s no Groucho Marx in the movie. You get Sam Huntington instead:
Sam Huntington: I had heard of it but was very unfamiliar with it. Then obviously once you’re reading for it and getting closer and closer and closer, you kind of bone up on it but to be honest, my character, obviously I learned about the world of Dylan Dog, but my character is kind of original. I think they couldn’t get the rights to Groucho or it was so wildly expensive, Groucho Marx’s estate was unattainable. So they created this wonderful character that was very original and fun.
