This was the suit that made you believe a man could fly.
Director Zack Snyder has shared a simple photo of Henry Cavill from his test for 2013’s Man of Steel — and he’s wearing the suit that original big-screen Superman Christopher Reeve made famous.
“First test with Henry… I knew right away he was my Superman,” Snyder wrote on Vero, where he shared the photo.
It’s the best look yet of Cavill donning Reeve’s suit (a previous photo that surfaced in 2014 blurred Cavill).
“We didn’t have the suit made when Henry was auditioning, so he wore the original Christopher Reeve suit,” Snyder told Dejour in 2016. “He put it on and when he came out of the trailer, everyone was like, ‘Dang, you’re Superman!'”
Cavill recalled the first time he put on this costume in a 2011 interview with Total Film.
“It’s extremely cool. There’s no other feeling like it,” he said. “They just put it on, I turned around and looked in the mirror and you can’t really play it cool — you sort of guffaw and laugh. I thought ‘OK, holy hell, this is real, it’s not a joke anymore. This is it … you’re doing it, you’re right in the middle of it.'”
Cavill is set to appear in November’s Justice League, though so far no footage of Superman in the film has been released. The character, who died at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, may be returning with a costume very different from both Reeve’s version and his own Man of Steel version.
Justice League opens Nov. 17.
