Every story of Superman and his younger cousin Kara — aka Supergirl — has the same problem: How do you make a hero relatable when they’re more powerful than almost anyone else? For Supergirl, star Milly Alcock and director Craig Gillespie turned to the red sun.
Kara lives in despair, masked by mere cantankerousness and cynicism, because almost everyone she cares about died in the destruction of her and cousin Clark’s home planet of Krypton. Now based on Earth, she’d like to drown her sorrows in dive bars. But her powers — fueled by our yellow sun — make that impossible. So she travels off-world to planets with red suns, which dampen her superpowers and imperviousness to booze.
As in many a hero’s journey, she initially refuses the call. Young Ruthye (Eve Ridley) meets Kara at an intergalactic tavern and begs her to hunt down her family’s killer, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts).
But Kara is just there to drink. She takes a pass.
She only swings into action when Krem poisons her best friend Krypto, the rambunctious mutt we first met as the sidekick of David Corenswet’s Man of Steel in last summer’s Superman.
This Supergirl, screenwriter Ana Nogueira’s script reminds us, may not be nice. But she’s good.
“She’s such a beautiful contrast to Clark,” says Alcock. “Good people do bad things, bad people do good things. And I think that she holds a lot of humanity for someone who isn’t human.”
Gillespie has a knack for complicated protagonists and antiheroes. His filmography includes 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, in which Ryan Gosling’s character dates a lifesize doll; 2017’s I, Tonya, in which Margot Robbie plays disgraced Olympian Tonya Harding; and 2021’s Cruella, in which Emma Stone plays Disney’s most iconic puppy hater. Kara can be standoffish, but at least she loves dogs.
“There’s been a theme I think in my work where often I’m dealing with outsiders, or people that are underdogs, or people that have been misconstrued, and this Supergirl is very much in that lane,” Gillespie says. “She comes from a lot of trauma… and as she goes through the film, she’s almost forced to confront it by having to deal with Ruthye, who’s been through a similar situation, and I think is holding a mirror up to her.“
Milly Alcock on Fear, Strength and Krypto
When Gillespie and Alcock, both of whom happen to be Australian, signed on for the film, she confessed to worries about the scale of the work ahead. She was accustomed to huge productions, having broken out with HBO’s House of the Dragon. But Supergirl puts her front and center in almost every scene.
The four-and-a-half month shoot involved shooting in the United Kingdom, Scotland and Iceland, including at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden outside London. For one Leavesden action sequence, Gillespie supervised 40-foot fireballs and Jason Momoa, as Lobo, speeding around on a real motorcycle.
Alcock jokes that her job was just to “stand and say what I’m meant to say,” but her job involved plenty of acting challenges. At one point early in the shoot she had to shoot a long, emotional sequence in Kryptonian, which isn’t, you know, a real language.
“She came into my office, sat down, and just told me how concerned she was with the enormity of this task, and what she was taking on,” GIllespie recalls. “She was so wonderful and honest and open, and that’s how it was from the get-go.”
Alcock recalls: “It’s so terrifying to be presented with an opportunity that could give you everything you’ve ever wanted. I think there’s natural fear,” Alcock explains. “I’ve never had a child, but I imagine new parents are like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing, but this is scary.’ … It’s the duality of those two things, and battling kind of my own internal battle. I was completely unsure if I could do it.”
She adds brightly: “But I did it.”
One of her most impressive acting achievements in the film is among the easiest to overlook: Alcock seems so connected with Krypto throughout the film that it’s easy to forget that he, like the Kryptonian language, is all pretend. Lovable as he may be, he’s CG.
|“I’ll tell you a story,” says Alcock. “We had a Romanian street dog one day come onto set. This dog just had to sit in a scene. He just had to sit. He was literally whisked from the street, thrown on set.
“Everyone was saying ‘sit’ in English, and I was like, ‘Guys, he’s Romanian — say sit in Romanian.’ This dog just would not sit. So I think since then we kind of made the conscious choice to for me to mime, or we had an animatronic dog that would breathe, but yeah — I just have to applaud our incredible VFX team, because they are the creators and crafters of Krypto, and I think they’ve done an astonishing job.”
That praise extends across the entire team. She cites “the utter privilege to work with so many talented people. Everybody who is on that set, whether they’re handling props or are a PA or transport, are the best at what they do.”
Gillespie praises her aplomb throughout the shoot, through long days that started with getting up early every day to work out with a trainer. Despite her initial apprehensions, Alcock says getting into the routine soon became “just second nature.”
What’s hard, she says, is now.
When we speak, she and Gillespie are deep into a lengthy press junket. She’s sitting before a Supergirl banner, fielding the same questions from reporter after reporter.
“I got into this because I wanted to be a really good actor,” she says. “I wanted to make really good, good art, so I understood how to navigate a set, how to not be fatigued, how to collaborate and be generous, and also be strong headed in my choices.
“But this is a completely new arena, you know? They don’t teach you how to deal with press at drama school. It’s been a massive learning experience, but it’s exciting.”
She’s also doing her best not to engage with the online banter and buffoonery that accompanies every superhero movie release, especially when women are involved. One internet dude achieved virality, for example, by wondering how Supergirl could be both bulletproof and have pierced ears.
We volunteer that it seems obvious: She got them pierced on a planet with a red sun, right?
“Yeah,” she laughs.
But in general, she doesn’t engage.
“I try not to feed it because it’s not healthy,” she says. “And I don’t sit here thinking that I’m the best person to ever walk this earth. So when you read something negative, it can feed a narrative that you already have about yourself, because you kind of believe these things, and then you’re like, ‘Someone said it, so it must be true.’ So it’s been a really great learning experience and challenge to regain that confidence and that trust within myself, because not everyone’s gonna like you, whether you’re a neighbor or a family member or a friend or a stranger.”
Supergirl Director Craig Gillespie on the Power of the Costume
Gillespie has the same don’t-engage philosophy. Asked if there are any tropes he consciously tried to avoid, he shared his gratitude that DC Films co-chief James Gunn already helped establish Kara’s character with her cameo in Superman, which Gunn wrote and directed.
“We were given this incredibly fully formed character that’s complex and unapologetic. They’re all traits that I was really excited to lean into.” He appreciates that Kara is “a female superhero that’s not sexualized in terms of her outfits and just the way she presents herself. She’s literally like she’s gotten out of bed, and that’s for the whole film. And she’s so unapologetic and gives like zero f—s about what other people think.”
The Supergirl costume — a gift from cousin Clark — turns out to have deep significance. It echoes Clark’s own costume, with friendly colors and a billowing cape he selected to signal that he’s a good guy.
Kara goes through most of the movie opting not to wear it. In earlier drafts of the script, she donned it much sooner, but Gillespie thought it would be more effective to keep her wearing regular clothes as long as possible.
“She’s running away from this responsibility to want to be a hero,” he explains. “It’s not something that she grew up with, it’s not something that she’s obligated to do. It’s been sort of pushed upon her, and so part of the process of her journey is deciding when and where she wants to wear that thing.”
Supergirl arrives in theaters June 26 from Warner Bros.
Main image: Craig Gillespie and Milly Alcock in Supergirl. Photo by Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.
Editor’s Note: Corrects link.
