“He didn’t want to leave”

Superman legend Christopher Reeve had a huge impact when he was a guest on Smallvilleaccording to DC star Tom Welling.

At this year’s Comic Con Stockholm, which Screen speech was participating, Welling revealed more about his time working with Reeve during his first Smallville episode in which the former Man of Steel actor joined one of the most important episodes of the series. During his panel, Welling explained not only how he learned about Reeve’s appearance on the show, but how the Superman star worked harder than he should have, sharing the following:

I knew three days before. You only get a script every 10 days, and by the time you get the script, you’re shooting three days later. And I remember it was Greg, again, the same guy, and he came to the set and said, ‘So what are you doing this weekend?’ and I thought, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Great. I [gotta] do a photo shoot’, like, he [goes,] “I think on Friday we’ll shoot in the morning, get on a plane, fly to New York and shoot on Saturday and Sunday in New York.” And I was like, ‘Why? I don’t want to go! [Greg says] ‘Well, we have Chris, and we have [him] for three hours on Saturday,’ and then I thought, ‘Okay… that’s a good idea.’

We flew in and the next day we filmed – Chris was only supposed to be there for three hours, and I think he was there for six or seven until his nurse, who had power of attorney over him, physically, I remember her saying – because he didn’t want to leave, he wanted to stay, to do the scenes with me, because originally we were just going to film his side, and then he would leave, and then I would work with someone else and film my side, but he wanted to stay – ‘If you don’t come with me, I’m going to call the police and I’m going to get you out of here.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘They always tell me what to do,’ and he started laughing. He ended up having to leave, but he really wanted to be there. We had a lot of fun.

Source: Tom Welling/Comic Con Stockholm