Black Adam: How That Cameo Came to Be and Was Filmed in Secret

MAJOR Spoilers ahead for Black Adam!

Dwayne Johnson and cinematographer Lawrence Sher have revealed how that Black Adam cameo came to be and was filmed in secret.

As reported by THR, the long-awaited return of Henry Cavill as Superman during the post-credits scene of Black Adam was not a moment the team behind the film had been planning since the beginning, but was something that was added near the end during reshoots.

While the Superman cameo excited the team, it was initially shot down by then-DC Films president Walter Hamada as he had his own plan for what Superman’s future would be, and it included introducing a Black Superman.

This would not stop Johnson, however, as he went around Hamada and spoke to Warner Bros. Pictures heads Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy to make it happen, and they were both on his side. The pair gave the team a tight deadline, but that didn’t stop them from securing Cavill and making the cameo happen.

Speaking on THR’s Behind the Screen podcast, Sher discussed how the scene was shot and that work began on making the cameo happen even before the whole thing was approved. The first step, according to Sher, was to film Johnson’s part of the post-credits scene and then try to make Cavill happen.

“If we can get Henry to be in it, then we’ll figure that out on a future date,” Sher said.

Sher said that Black Adam director Jaume Collet-Serra wanted to just use the throne room set that was already in place, create “something for Dwayne to walk into,” and then shoot it in “like 10 minutes.”

That scene was the last scene shot on the last day of additional photography, and the team then created the second part of the scene with “a [Superman] body double and a version of John Williams’ 1978 Superman theme they found on Google.” Superman’s face was never shown, and the focus was instead on his iconic emblem.

“Watching an actor come out of a full silhouette into that, was actually goosebumps. ‘Wow, this is 100 percent going to work. Now they need to figure out if they can get the guy with the head to be there,’” Sher recalls.

The team showed their work in progress to a test audience, and “it played gangbusters.” It inspired them even more to get Cavill to return and the rest, as they say, is history.

“There are certain people that are iconic as the characters that they play, and [Cavill is] really one of them,” says Sher.

For more, check out our review of Black Adam, our explainer of the ending, what Cavill’s cameo means for the DCEU, and our deep dive into the history of Sabbac.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.