The surviving family of 1978’s Superman star Christopher Reeve reflected on his legacy as the Man of Steel, giving little thought to his controversial CGI cameo in The Flash.
Reeve’s children Will, Alexandra, and Matthew took part in an exclusive interview for Variety to promote the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story as part of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The Reeve children were asked about their father’s artificial presence as the Man of Steel during the multiverse collision climax of the 2023 DCEU movie which they replied they had not seen nor had any collaboration with Warner Bros. on the cameo.
Instead of speaking in depth about The Flash, Reeve’s children highlighted their father’s life and career through the upcoming documentary and how it allowed them to be closer to him after his passing in 2005.
“It is a gift. We’re so lucky,” Matthew said. “We not only have his films to look at but a collection of home movies to dig up and go through and interviews on YouTube of him to pull up. Seeing things I hadn’t seen before didn’t change my perception of him but enhanced it . . . like some rare Australian interview done in 1977 that was uploaded and I didn’t know existed. It was pretty cool to see that and uncover a lot more material than we knew about.”
In taking part in the documentary of her father’s life, Alexandra Reeve described it as a “beautiful gift” because it’s rare to “see your parent’s life told in its totality . . . to see a life well lived on screen and in its full complexity. We wanted people to see the highs and lows, the public facade and what’s happening at home.”
The life of Christopher Reeve
Reeve became an overnight superstar when Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie hit screens in 1978, redefining the Man of Steel with sensitivity and courage that inspired the world. Though the actor went on to make three more Superman appearances between 1981 and 1987, Reeve found it difficult to break out of his iconic role as most of his non-Superman movies underperformed at the box office. He attempted to reboot his image as a character actor in made-for-television projects in the early ’90s until his tragic horse-riding accident in 1995 left him paralyzed from the waist down. From that point on until the end of his life, Reeve became a worldwide advocate for the physically disabled, founding the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation for spinal cord injury support and research.
