Henry Cavill‘s Superman is many things, but no one would describe him as “fun.” Thanks to a rather bizarre facial hair mishap, that’s about to change.
After the unexpected departure of director Zack Snyder, Justice League is going through extensive reshoots with Joss Whedon. This means pulling actors out of their schedules with other movies, and in Henry Cavill’s case, that created a unique problem. His mustache.
In the latest Mission: Impossible movie, Cavill plays a character with a luxuriant mustache. And according to a deeply hilarious report from Variety, “Paramount, which is distributing the Mission: Impossible sequel, would not allow Cavill to shave the facial hair while production was taking place.” So right now, Cavill is filming Superman scenes with a mustache, which will then be digitally removed in post-production.
Naturally, film Twitter is all over this.
In an act of defiance, I digitally added the mustache back in. (It took my guys at Skywalker Ranch 600 hours and 2 billion dollars.) pic.twitter.com/j2ZnWyWT6f
— Jameson (@jamesonstarship) July 24, 2017
Mustache Superman is canon pic.twitter.com/TCpJEJnOXy
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) July 24, 2017
what if JUSTICE LEAGUE just let Superman come back from the dead with a mustache and no one else on the team ever addressed it
— Evil Emma Stefansky (@stefabsky) July 24, 2017
Incredibly, this isn’t the first time Joss Whedon has dealt with this exact problem. When filming the post-credits “shawarma” scene for Avengers, Chris Evans had already grown a beard for another movie. Speaking to Variety, his co-star Jeremy Renner explained that Evans had to film the entire scene in dubious prosthetics. (In the final product, you can kind of tell that he’s hiding his face.)
“They had to do all these prosthetics over his face. The poor guy, he was in a chair for like four hours just for this three-second scene. He looked awful. He looked like his face was melting. Imagine if you have to put prosthetics over a thick beard, he looked like he got stung by a bee.”
If there’s any justice in the world, Warner Bros. will release some pre-CGI outtakes of Superman with the full mustache visible. It’s the least they can do, after the last two Superman movies were so utterly lacking in comedy.
H/T Variety
