HENRY CAVILL WON'T BACK DOWN
“ The cape is in the closet. It’s still mine”
OF all the Men of Steel on display at House of Secrets – a comic-book store in Burbank with red-and-blue renditions of Superman dotting the ceiling, the walls and even the floor – none is as striking, or as symbolically fraught, as the one staring down at Henry Cavill. The actor is standing under a glowering, arms-folded miniature sculpture of Supes on a bookshelf, right next to a similarly intimidating bust of Batman. The two crime fighters battled it out in 2016’s aggressively hyped Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, one of three films for which Cavill donned Superman’s cape. It grossed $873 million worldwide and is the biggest box-office hit of Cavill’s career.
It’s also one of the most castigated superhero blockbusters of all time – a film to be debated on Reddit forums and convention floors for years, or at least until the next Batman/ Superman team-up. When Cavill looks up and notices the troubled big-screen rivals standing near each other, he pauses, a muted smile flickering across his face. “Oh, well,” he declares wryly before moving on down the aisle. It’s an early-autumn afternoon, and the 36-year-old Cavill has dropped by House of Secrets to pick up some reading material for the flight home to London. It’s his first visit to the beloved store, which might be the most Superman-centric location in the entire Los Angeles area. The offices of DC Comics are a quick drive from here, as are the headquarters of Warner Bros., the studio responsible for Cavill’s Krypton triptych: Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman, and Justice League (2017). This is the last place you’d expect to find him milling about, only because it’s almost too obvious a hideaway.
But here he is, cruising the store in a black V-neck shirt and light-blue jeans, his. “He doesn’t blend in very easily.” Indeed, once the half dozen or so customers get a look at the guy with the bumper-plate pecs and three-mile-wide shoulders – and the equally towering, semi-incognito bodyguard trailing him – a few start staring at one another with furrow-browed disbelief: wait, is that dude . . . Superman?
