‘Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow’ interview: Milly Alcock on why Kara is more punk rock than Superman

Australian actor Milly Alcock will soon be stepping into one of the oldest lineages in blockbuster cinema . The story of Krypton on screen reaches back almost half a century to Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978, the film that turned Christopher Reeve’s version of Kal-El into the defining modern superhero, and established the cultural imagination of “truth, justice, and the American Way” that Hollywood has spent decades either preserving or interrogating. Since then, the House of El has passed through successive generations, from Helen Slater’s Supergirl in 1984 and Tom Welling’s television-era Clark Kent in Smallville ; to Henry Cavill’s brooding alien in Zack Snyder’s DC Extended Universe and now, David Corenswet’s earnest reinvention in James Gunn’s 2025 Superman — every actor who puts on the crest carries the accumulated expectations about what a Kryptonian hero ought to represent.