Actor from Flash TV show says that’s not actually him in the Flash movie
Somehow, one of the Flash movie's big cameos is even more confusing than it seemed
Aux News Flash
[The following contains vague spoilers for The Flash (movie) and The Flash (TV show)]
If you’re one of the vast majority of Americans who did not go see The Flash this weekend but still wanted to read spoilers about its already infamous deluge of weird, CG-heavy cameo appearances, you may have heard that actor Teddy Sears shows up as Jay Garrick—a.k.a. the first Flash from the comics, with the Hermes hat and stuff—reprising a role he played on The CW’s Flash TV show.
The thing about this cameo is that it doesn’t make a lick of goddamn sense: Not only are the other cameos mostly references to DC superhero movies, but Sears didn’t even really play Jay Garrick on The Flash. He was a villain pretending to be Jay Garrick. So they threw in one cameo from the hit Flash TV show, where Ezra Miller’s version of the Flash canonically got the name “the Flash” when he made a cameo of his own, and they chose a confusing fake version of a different character and and not Grant Gustin, the freakin’ Flash himself?
Well, here’s the other thing about that cameo: It’s not Teddy Sears at all. It is, as TVLine puts it, “no actor of note” (take that, unnamed actor). TVLine talked to Sears himself who said that it sure “looks like” his face, but it’s not. He said that people kept telling him he was in the new Flash movie, but, he says, “I’m pretty sure I would have remembered shooting a major DC Studios film.” TVLine says “well-placed sources” on both the TV and film side of DC confirm that it’s also “absolutely not archival footage” of Sears on The Flash, meaning he didn’t film anything new and they didn’t reuse anything old—so it’s definitely not Teddy Sears.
Which actually makes the cameo even more bizarre. The other cameos are famous people in famous roles, with archival footage and one big CG inside joke for superhero movie nerds, but then they just went ahead and picked some guy for some other version of the Flash? James Gunn is co-running DC Studios now, surely he could’ve put his feelings about the Arrowverse aside for an actual cameo from Grant Gustin if they wanted another famous version of the Flash, or pull a Spider-Verse and merge live-action and animation for a cameo from Michael Rosenabum’s Flash.
Someone is going to write a book about the Flash movie at some point, and we’re excited for the chapter on this one specific thing.
69 Comments
“Someone is going to write a book about the Flash movie at some point…”I think you’re over estimating the cultural significance of this…let’s say ‘film’.
I think you’re underestimating the number of people who are likely to write a tell-all…let’s say “book”.
So you think there will be more then 1 tell all book about…..let’s say “The Flash”…??
Books have been written about John Carter and The Room, so a high-profile movie like this is certainly not out of the question.
Also it’s a movie that took forever to make and then the star was accused of having a teenage sex cult where they had an altar of his action figure, I can definitely see someone writing a book. I’m sure there’s a lot of behind the scenes nonsense
There was a book (actually a good one) about the flopped John Carter movie (John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood by Michael D. Sellers) so it is not impossible.
Honestly, I’d find the John Carter story fascinating considering the source material was nearly perfect for a movie adaptation and they somehow managed to do nearly everything wrong in the process.
John Carter is a former Confederate soldier who has sci-fi adventures based on wacky early 20th century conceptions that there could be breathable air and alien races on Mars; conceptions fueled by the fact that humans didn’t yet have telescopes powerful enough to tell them otherwise. Is there something there that could be adapted to something cool? Sure. But it was far from perfect material.
The fact that he was a former Confederate is a very minor point about his character and it is weird that the movie chose to include that given modern sensibilities. As for the the unrealistic depiction of Mars, 1) it was never meant to be scientifically accurate even at the time 2) That’s kind of what “steampunk”, which is a popular genre today, is all about — taking the Victorian/Edwardian idea of science, technology and the future as a given, even (and perhaps especially) when it conflicts with current knowledge.I agree that the movie didn’t work for a variety of reasons (and Sellers’ book goes into the many problems of its screenwriting and production), but I don’t think the problem was the source material.
Quick, name me a hugely popular steampunk film!It is a subgenre that moves novels, games, cosplay, etc. But for whatever reason it has never really caught on in Film & TV. (At least in the West. It does well in anime for some reason.)
True, I just tried to think of a steampunk film and couldn’t think of anything but things like the 1999 Will Smith Wild, Wild West adaptation which was critically panned. Wikipedia claims Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is steampunk, which I hadn’t thought of it as, but it does have wacky technology created by Nikolai Tesla, so in a way I suppose it is.
*Maybe* Captain Nemo? As far as actual hits. The late great Ray Stevenson was in a kind of steampunk-y Three Musketeers with Mila Jovovich and I think Christoph Walz as Richeleu but that was DTV I believe. IIRC there was a YA Hangry Games knockoff at some point. But it died quick.
Probably because Steampunk is just inherently stupid. It’s a kind of neat concept that if you spend any amount of time thinking about just becomes more and more impractical. It works in anime because you can draw cool looking inventions that would look ridiculous if you tried for live props. That’s my theory anyhow.
I also think Japanese culture is a lot more tied into technology as part of their world building. It’s more ingrained in their stories.
Lasers that automatically end 1-4ft from their start point make no sense yet there is a whole successful franchise built around them. Impractical science and tech is never the issue. A greater one is the lack of good stories that use it in western cinema.
The failure was primarily from the study being embarrassed by the material title started out as Princess of Mars, then John Carter of Mars and finally John Carter.
It always surprises me that people were shocked at John Carter’s failure to land. They cite how the original books were hugely influential, and indeed they were, but it’s not like there was either a large or particularly vocal fanbase that either wanted to see it, or had much if any nostalgia for the concept.
It’s really an interesting book, John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood, written by Michael D. Sellers who, on top of being a filmmaker and writer himself, was the president of a Edgar Rice Burroughs fan club and watched as everything that could screw up did screw up, from the studio’s Publicity Department constantly dropping the ball, to the film’s director Andrew Stanton’s (an Oscar-winning Pixar director making his move to live-action) repeated miscalculations, to Disney’s phobia of using “Mars” in the title, to George Lucas himself possibly having a hand in the film’s failure given how much of STAR WARS was…”freely borrowed”, let’s say, from Burroughs’s John Carter stories.
Yeah, this film isn’t a spectacular fuck-up like John Carter where Hollywood screwed it, nor is it some piece of crazed outsider art like The Room – both of which make for fascinating subjects, albeit unintentionally. The Flash is just going to go down as uninterestingly mediocre.
The cultural significance might not be huge, but from an industry standpoint, this has been an insane ride. 10 years since the announcement, a TV show that basically stole all the hype for the character, the wild decisions by the studio for pretty much every aspect of the DCEU, the back and forth on keeping then ditching then keeping Snyder’s vision of the character, everything regarding Ezra Miller’s behavior….there’s a lot of interesting stuff to read about here. The movie itself might not be amazing, nor is the Flash a big enough character to most people, but you can pretty much use this movie as an primary example of every possible weird and bad thing that tentpole superhero movies do all rolled up in to one.
I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I feel like Titans pulled this off a little better towards the end of the final season. And that show was terrible save for the first half of season 3. I did enjoy the movie though. The strong plethora definitely carried it. It’s crazy that Ezra Miller gave the best performance as older Barry and the worst as young Barry.
The Titans one was fun, and the Arrowverse one was so comprehensive i can’t even critique it easily. The one in the Flash movie was just… kinda weird. Like did they need to have glowing globes filmed with frames of shows to depict the worlds? And the few times they did zoom in on the people in the multiverse, it was deepfake/heavy CGI stuff. They couldn’t just throw in some archival footage of Grant Gustin?
That said, i did enjoy the movie as well, and have to admit Miller was pretty good in it.
Performances* not plethora. Fucking auto correct.
‘Would you say that I have…a plethora of pinatas?’
Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?
I tried watching The Titans, but found it too dark. Literally dark. I could not turn up the brightness on my tv enough to see what was going on during any night-time scene.But Hawk and Dove were cool.
Sounds like someone’s about to get some free money their way for use of his likeness
Nah. Zaslav will have the scene excised from all existing copies to save having to pay anything.
Sorry the terms of service he accepted include full use of his likeness up to defecation and beyond.
“That changed the Hollywood film industry forever until Zaslav zaslav’d things up.”
Possibly – if they used AI or CGI or anything else to make the “actor of no note” look like Teddy Sears, then they’re absolutely violating likeness rights. But if they found and cast a guy who naturally looks like Sears, I don’t think there’s anything that can be considered illegal.I haven’t seen it so I don’t know how much this looks like him though.
i think people are making a bigger deal of it than it really is. it does look like teddy sears but its hard to tell bc the camera is moving and there’s a lot of cgi noise going on in the scene so ppl’s brains autofill their memories with teddy sears. i doubt if you actually paused the scene or looked at the assets the vfx team built that it would look exactly like him.
Just a small taste of the carnage to come.
Hard hitting journalism.
I half expected the news to reveal that the cameo was an A.I. creation. I think the movie is quite bad, and I’d pretty much checked out by that point anyway, but not using Grant Gustin when they had the prime excuse to, does seem like a weird oversight.
Not really that much of a weird oversight when the new brass is basically writing off the entirety of the Arrowverse, which I think is sad and disappointing. I know Gunn wants a clean slate from everything before but this movie doesn’t even setup that rebooted universe well (or if it does I have no idea how the fuck that’s supposed to work) and feels like a total waste of time overall, throwing a bone to what was overall a good TV franchise with a small cameo wouldn’t kill any plans.
I know Gunn wants a clean slate from everything beforeUnless his wife is directly or tangentially involved, natch.
kill yourself
Peacemaker is the only piece of DCEU media that rose from “this isn’t as bad as I thought” to something that is genuinely goddamn good so I’m fine with that.
“but not using Grant Gustin when they had the prime excuse to, does seem like a weird oversight.”
Why? They didn’t use half the actors who played Batman, they didn’t use Dean Cain or Brandon Routh.
Well if they didn’t include Grant Gustin or John Wesley Shipp they definitely weren’t going to include Teddy Sears.
If they had included John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen, with a surprise appearance by James van der Beek as Bart West-Allen, the movie would have won Best Picture at a walk.
* * SPOILERS FOR A TWO WEEK OLD MOVIE **
Not necessarily – Across the Spider-Verse didn’t include RDJ’s Iron Man or Holland’s Spidey, but it *did* include Donald Glover as the live-action Prowler
Oh, I thought it was Hartley Sawyer
I guess I’m not surprised. I didn’t think any of those were supposed to be the real people there. Those last few scenes were like the WB IP watching the basketball game of Space Jam 2. Except instead of randos in cheap cosplay, everyone was portrayed by Jib Jabs of the original actors.
So in between digital graveyard digging they maybe kinda sorta used an actors face without permission? Jesus…
It’s not like this guy ever claimed he was Gwyneth Paltrow or anything.
If I recall correctly, the inclusion of Ezra Miller into the TV Flash’s Crisis event was a late idea from the executive level which may have punted the appearance of the Reverse Flash from the TV crossover event which is kind of funny given that the Reverse Flash has also been punted from a major story of his involving him in the comics and TV (namely the death of Barry’s mother).
Yeah, the lack of Reverse Flash adds up to all the things that made this film feel entirely pointless. The script generally sucks, particularly the entirely broken aesop at the end (you have to accept the past… unless it deals with saving your dad from prison, that’s fine), but the idea that this somehow sets up the Gunnverse or really anything larger even for the Flash is ridiculous.I wonder what the initial plan for this film even was, because I can’t imagine this was the original script they had in mind.
The original plan was that Barry would see the alive-again Keaton and Calle in the final scene, setting up a mostly-DCEU continuity (minus Affleck and Cavill) that could include everything from Keaton’s older Batman training JK Simmons’ daughter to fish-out-of-water shenanigans as Momoa’s Aquaman wonders why this old guy won’t get off his boat.*
*WB, back when AT&T was still in charge, loudly touted Keaton’s role as being akin to Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury in all their “upcoming” projects.
So instead they decided not to set up jack shit for Gunn’s new thing? This is weird and what a waste of Keaton and Calle.
Why would Gunn want to set up his universe in any way that tethers it to Ezra Miller? The first version of the ending was Keaton and Calle (because that was Hamada’s idea for a soft reboot), the second version of the ending had Keaton, Calle, Gal Gadot, and Henry Cavill (during that short period when Cavill was coming back to be a foil to Black Adam, arguing about the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe). Gunn didn’t like what either of those endings were promising, so he opted for the ending that’s in theaters, which decidedly doesn’t promise anything for the future.
At first glance I assumed that was a Skarsgard.
Was part of the test audience screenings for these films and these cameos weren’t in them (but there were other scenes cut from the final film).
Spill, what scenes did you see that weren’t in the final product?
Different actors in the end scene and cancelled post credit scene. I’m confused whether or not my NDA still is in effect so don’t want to possibly break it.
It was reported that Cavill filmed a cut cameo for it; if that’s who you’re referring to, blink twice.
I did wonder why Sears was being credited by some as playing Garrick, given that he very definitely did *not* play him on TV. Would’ve made more sense to have John Wesley Shipp. OTOH, I don’t care that it was some nobody; it was just nice to have the OG Flash represented.
“I did wonder why Sears was being credited by some as playing Garrick, given that he very definitely did *not* play him on TV.”
Whoa! You’re trying to tell me TV and movies are different???
I had trouble following the problem until I got to the part where they used an actor who looked like the actor who played the character on the show. That does seem…weird, at the very least.Teddy Sears is a hottie. I like talking about him way more than about this movie. I still remember seeing him in Samantha Who and thinking, who is this hot hunk of moose? For some reason that struck me more than his appearance in Mad Men, I guess, which was BEFORE Samantha Who. And that’s a piece of information that makes me feel very strange. Such was the already-aged feeling of Samantha Who.Anyway, Teddy Sears: !!!
“I had trouble following the problem until I got to the part where they used an actor who looked like the actor who played the character on the show.”
They didn’t.
They had an actor do motion-capture and then CG’d the face, exactly as they did for ALL the little cameos inside the Flash Force.
“Well, here’s the other thing about that cameo: It’s not Teddy Sears at all.”
Yeah, no shit. It also wasn’t Nic Cage, Christopher Reeve or George Reeves.
Were you confused as to whether the plethora over VERY OBVIOUSLY CG characters were real people or not?
Someone else mentioned this may be the case where Warner used an AI to get a jay garrick image for that cgi scene and it gave them a Teddy Sears likeness b/c ai is terrible. If that’s the case he should sue.
way more likely it was a photo double or a vfx worker who offered to lend their likeness for a non-speaking role. if it was ai, then it’s extremely doubtful it would give an exact replica of teddy sears’ likeness. artists have been using ai and other computer software to create composite people for decades now (the first instance i can remember is james bond in agent under fire) and the newer generative ai models are very good at creating the faces of people who dont actually exist.somebody else said it best: teddy sears just looks like what you think of when you imagine jay garrick as a real person. he doesnt have a particularly unique face either. this guy could be his doppelganger: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1837590/
This broken telephone level nonsense by early viewers that stems from the fact that the Flash TV show did a great job casting Teddy Sears as *what you would expect a Golden Age Jay Garrick to look like.* They did the same thing with Elongated Man. Sometimes casting is bang on, yknow?
I make my living attending parties and events as a Teddy Sears lookalike. Inexplicably lucrative.
Hmmm So Warner’s is saying that’s some unknown actor? Not a CGI version of Sears?
yes