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The Curious Case of Henry Cavill
- Robert Bouffard
- Aug 15, 2018
- 3 min read
Mission: Impossible – Fallout has been out for a few weeks now and is being almost universally well-received. But there is one aspect of the movie that I think is flying a little bit under the radar, and that is Henry Cavill.
Cavill is obviously most well known as Superman in the DC Extended Universe. When Man of Steel was released in 2013, he was mostly unknown, at least to American audiences. His only other leading role in a movie at that point was in 2011’s Immortals, which was not good (more like, it was pretty bad), but had a decent showing at the worldwide box office. He had also played a prominent role in the TV show, The Tudors.
After MoS, Cavill starred alongside Armie Hammer in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., then twice more as Superman, before he co-starred in M:I. Out of all of these, only Superman and M:I have had any sort of success. But why?
Cavill has plenty of off screen charisma and he doesn’t take himself too seriously, like in this video where he plays up the fact that he had a mustache in Fallout in a really funny way. I know what he is like off screen doesn’t have too much bearing on his lack of roles. But The Rock, for example, isn’t a great actor, but he is so great in real life that he continues to get film and TV roles largely based off of name recognition. So the personality is one piece to the puzzle for Cavill.
Now, Immortals wasn’t a good movie, but apparently it showed MoS director Zack Snyder enough to warrant him being cast as the most popular superhero on Earth and on Krypton. He really didn’t have a lot to do in Immortals, as it was poorly written and overall poorly executed. But he got his chance to shine in MoS, and he was great in that, strictly based on what he was given to do in the script. Say what you want about the approach that movie takes on Superman, but Cavill played that particular role exceptionally. He showed raw emotion and the ability to be a calm, even-keeled, and reassuring presence as Clark Kent/Superman.
But it was Cavill’s performances in U.N.C.L.E. and Fallout that really got me thinking that this guy should be a bigger star than he is. TMfU is a criminally underrated and underseen spy flick. It has great action, it is well-edited, and it’s sneakily hilarious. And the hilarity is largely due to Cavill’s character. He is an arrogant, sarcastic, and awesome spy who has a rivalry with the one guy that he has to work with. This dynamic makes the action and the comedy work well, again, largely due to Cavill’s performance. He showed here that he’s more than just an action star with a tragic past.
Fallout doesn’t really give him a lot of characterization, but it puts him on display simply due to his brute strength. He goes full action star with his fist-cocking and mustache-growing. And while he was great in this movie, his solid performance is what made me think he should branch out a little bit.
I can see him being able to take a page out of Chris Hemsworth’s book and getting a little bit into comedy. Hemsworth showed it on talk shows, then as a straight comedic character in Ghostbusters, and then in the superhero comedy Thor: Ragnarok. Cavill already has the talk show humor and a little bit of the movie humor from TMfU, but he should take that and run. He should do something where his big muscles don’t take up the majority of his characterization (even though I’m guilty of this since I casted him as Hadley in my recast of The Shawshank Redemption). Maybe he could even use that ironically, like Hemsworth.
Henry Cavill should really be getting more recognition and more roles than he currently is. His talents are, to put it bluntly, being wasted as a subpar and boring version of Superman. He definitely has it in him to branch out in the ways I discussed and I’d really like to see him go for it.
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