There are superheroes that forever have given off a faint whiff of the gay, particularly middle aged, single men who adopt young wards, and then there is Superman as red-blooded, American male and heterosexual as you can get (in blue spandex and calf-high red boots). So when openly gay Superman remake director Bryan Singer, who has a not-so-secret penchant for handsome, younger boys, hired square-jawed nobody Brandon Routh to play his Man of Steel, many a Kryptopurist eyebrow was raised and the rumors starting flying: could a Hollywood director have gasp! actually hired someone he wanted to bone? It simply isn't done! Today, Radar fans the fanboy flamer flames:

Of course, if Singer cast an object of his desire in a role, it wouldn t be the first time. According to Alex Burton, the unknown who played the Human Torch Pyro in Singer s first X-Men blockbuster, he was given the part after a hot-tub session with the director at a Hollywood party. Bryan created that role especially for me, says Burton, who went on to act in exactly zero films post-X-Men.

We must say, that must have been some jacuzzi line reading for the director to go so far as to pluck a character out of another comic book entirely.* The official word on Routh's casting however, from an Entertainment Weekly article from earlier this year, places their first meeting at a very public and unsudsy Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. "He stood up and up, and up, and up," the director explained. "I said, 'Okay...'" Clearly, it was not couch-casting antics but Routh's freakish natural ability to fly that won him the role.

Multiple updates after the jump.

*UPDATE: The original version of Radar's story identified Burton's character as the Human Torch, quite obviously a Fantastic Four hero. They've since been lit on fire by furious comic book geeks and have since corrected the character's name to Pyro. Carry on.

UPDATE 2: Never before has one small blockquote required quite this much updating. Turns out Pyro appears in X-Men 2 and is played by actor Aaron Stanford, who will be reprising the role in X-Men 3. While Alex Burton is credited as John in X-Men, he shouldn't be confused with Stanford, who did no improvisational hot-tub exercises with Bryan Singer to get his role (or with X-Men 3 director Brett Ratner, to our knowledge).

• Is Singer s Superman A Loss For Lois? [Radar]
• People of Steel [Entertainment Weekly]

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