Man of steel

The Man of Steel was a paying gig for Brandon Routh even before he grabbed the lead in “Superman Returns.”

At a Halloween party at the Hollywood bowling alley where he was bartending three years ago, months before he first tested for the role, Routh won $100 for his costume.

He came as Clark Kent, with a Superman shirt underneath.

“I thought, ‘Well, OK, this is an easy costume to put together because I have a Superman shirt already and I have a suitcoat, and I just need to buy some thick Clark glasses,’ ” says Routh, who had just a few television credits behind him when the “Superman Returns” announcement made him an instant celebrity.

He follows in the footsteps of the last big-screen Superman, Christopher Reeve. Another virtual unknown, Reeve won the part for Richard Donner’s original 1978 film about the superhero from planet Krypton and reprised the role in three sequels.

With his chiseled features and broad, boyish grin, the 26-year-old Routh bears a fair resemblance to Reeve, who also was 26 when “Superman” debuted. (Reeve died in 2004, nine years after he was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident.)

“People had always kind of told me that I looked like Christopher Reeve, so I thought, ‘OK, we’ll just do this for the Halloween party.’ And I won the hundred dollars,” Routh says. “And everyone, my co-workers, were kind of shocked by (the) resemblance.”

“Superman Returns” – the first Superman movie since Reeve’s “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” in 1987 – has the Man of Steel (and his nerdy alter ego, Clark) mysteriously vanishing for five years as he ventures into space to see if anything is left of his destroyed home world.

Meantime, Earth moves on. Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), the love of Superman’s life, has a son and becomes engaged to another man. A romantic triangle develops when Superman comes back to Metropolis, just as archrival Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) embarks on a scheme for world domination.

Routh’s first memory of the comic-book superhero was when he was 5 or 6 and the first “Superman” movie was scheduled to play on television.

He got pumped up with anticipation, running and jumping around the family home in Iowa pretending he was Superman.

“I made myself sick with excitement,” he recalls. “Migrained, and I was sick to my stomach through half the film. The second half, I began to feel better and watched the rest of it, then begged my parents to rent the rest of the films.”

The third of four children, Routh grew up in Norwalk, Iowa – about 100 miles from the hometown of George Reeves, who played the superhero in the 1950s television show “Adventures of Superman.”

Routh’s mother is a teacher, his father a carpenter, and both parents play music on the side.

A bit of a singer, pianist and trumpet player himself, Routh initially set out to be a writer, studying for a year at the University of Iowa while modeling and acting on the side to help pay the bills.

But he left school to pursue acting in New York and later Hollywood, where he landed a recurring role on “One Life to Live” and had guest spots on such prime-time shows as “Will & Grace” and “The Gilmore Girls.”

Even so, Routh was just another struggling actor, taking a bartending job to make ends meet. He auditioned for director McG, who had been signed on to make a “Superman” film that later fell through.

Bryan Singer then came on board for “Superman Returns” and began a search for an unknown to play the title role. The screen test Routh did for McG, with its mixture of vulnerability and confidence, caught Singer’s eye.

After a two-hour meeting with Routh, Singer left Los Angeles to do location scouting in Australia, feeling he had found his man.

“I slept a little better on that flight knowing in my head that I had my Superman, and now I’ll go through the motions of seeing some other folks and really vetting it,” Singer says. “But I knew with that meeting, I had already made the decision.”

It was two months before the director told Routh he had the role, though.

“I called my mother, and she screamed and cried and did all that crazy stuff,” Routh says.

The 6-foot-3-inch Routh lifted weights, adding 22 pounds of muscle and bulking up to 220 pounds. He also did training to improve flexibility for the hours he would spend in a harness for the movie’s flying sequences.

Co-star Bosworth says Routh truly embodied Superman – and also the hero’s shy, clumsy alter ego.

“He’s going to kill me for saying this: I see more of the Clark Kent qualities in him,” Bosworth says. “He’s not a fumbling, awkward guy, but he’s just got this quiet humility about him.

“I don’t think you can fake being a good person,” she adds. “You can’t fake being kind. He really is that person.”

Nothing is definite yet for Routh’s next project, though he and other cast members are signed on for two sequels – assuming “Superman Returns” plays out as the blockbuster it’s likely to be.

“I’d like to get a few other films in for me to have other experiences before we go back to Superman,” Routh says. “It’s only going to make this character even stronger as I become a more veteran actor.”