An Exclusive Interview with Superman Dean Cain

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Not that anyone would ever be stupid enough to break into Superman’s house. But if they do, Dean Cain is ready.

“I will blast you,” the former Man of Steel says, holding up his Beretta 1301 and gesturing towards his outward-facing pool deck, insinuating the fate of anyone who might try and cross it.

In case an intruder opts for the front door, Cain welcomes them with a mat warning, “Stand outside and get right with Jesus. Tell him you’re on your way.”

None of this should come as a surprise when visiting the home of a sitting board member of the National Rifle Association, much less an outspoken, steadfast Second Amendment advocate and regular guest on Fox News. But if you only know Dean Cain as a Princeton defensive-back-turned-TV-Superman, a trip to his home outside Las Vegas tells a fascinating story.

This morning, we’ve made plans to go shooting in the desert, so his guns are laid out on his kitchen island like a cold steel breakfast spread. But instead of bagels and cantaloupe, today’s buffet includes an M4 Colt and a Desert Eagle.

“This one they custom-made for me,” he says, handing me a Magnum Research Desert Eagle .50 pistol, which, to my estimation, weighs slightly more than a Tesla. It’s emblazoned with the Superman logo and his Princeton football #11, with “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” engraved on top. “It was supposed to be a .44, but what was I supposed to do, send it back and complain?”

Everything about Dean Cain seems completely ordinary until it’s not. His firearms are much like those of any avid collector until you spot the custom Superman Deagle. He guides me through his gun safes, proudly displaying his collection while acting as if the MTV Rock and Jock B-Ball Jam MVP trophy and a 1988 Buffalo Bills conditioning guide aren’t even present. He inquired about my time in the Marine Corps and what guns I had the chance to shoot. 

“I got to shoot a SAW a few months back,” he muses, then adds, “On the Royal Jordanian Range. That was with my buddy Prince Ghazi. We were great friends at Princeton.” He says this as casually as you might mention hanging with your ninth-grade lab partner. Cain shows me photos of him shooting the SAW, with the prince playing spotter.

“That’s the thing about going to a school like Princeton, the people that you meet. The senior class, when I got there, had Michelle Obama and Jeff Bezos. I screwed up not buddying up to Bezos.” He omits mentioning he was probably too busy with his Princeton girlfriend, Brooke Shields.

To any ’90s kid, Dean Cain was an icon. He was our first Superman. For many girls, he was their first crush. However, after Lois and Clark ended in 1997, he faded into Hollywood obscurity. While he had appeared in numerous smaller films and TV shows, he wasn’t a household name until a few years ago, when he began guest-hosting Fox & Friends. He has considered hosting F&F full-time now that Pete Hegseth is SECDEF.

Now, he is an outspoken advocate for gun rights. While he’s quick to emphasize that he’s a registered independent, he keeps a MAGA hat behind his desk, right above his helmet from a brief stint with the Buffalo Bills.

Cain is also serving a second term as an NRA board member, a position he ran for after encouragement from former CEO Wayne LaPierre.

“Half my mom’s side of the family are Life Members,” he says, “and I’d known Wayne through other friends. He told me if I wanted to run for the board, I should give it a shot. He’s like, ‘You’re gonna catch a lot of flak for it,’ but I thought this is the right thing to do, and I don’t care if it affects me.”

Whether it affected his career is subjective. While some have speculated that his conservative-leaning viewpoints cost him work, Cain claims that his career was influenced by an even more significant factor. Three years after Lois and Clark went off the air, Cain had his son Christopher with former Miss Spain Samantha Torres. The couple never married, and the challenges of co-parenting made it difficult to move for TV and movie roles. 

“He’s my best friend, my favorite person in the world, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to be his dad,” Cain says. “That, of course, has affected my career tremendously because there are roles I couldn’t take. But it’s not even a question to me.”

Today, the plan is to exercise our Second Amendment rights in the Nevada desert, but a tweaked ankle has Superman limping in a pair of Altra Runners. He vows to tough it out, despite the obvious pain, because he’s excited to shoot his custom Desert Eagle for the first time.

We enter the garage with our guns and make a beeline past his Aston Martin to a dusty 2013 Ford Raptor. I sit in the passenger seat next to what appears to be a CB radio until Cain removes the top to reveal a GLOCK 17 and a fully loaded magazine. 

“You never know out here,” he says, raising his eyebrows. I think if there’s ever an apocalypse, all that’ll be left is the cockroaches and Dean Cain.

Along the way, he fills me in on what he’s been doing since he took off the cape. He mentions mostly smaller-budget films, in which he both acts and produces. He’s just secured distribution for his latest film, Little Angels, but he seems irritated when people call, interrupting our Friday afternoon shoot to make deals. 

“It’s this Nick Saban-type character, who has the national title won until he puts in this female kicker, and she doinks the extra point off the upright,” he says. “He loses it, and to save his job, he’s gotta coach this girls’ soccer team. It’s like The Mighty Ducks, with girls’ soccer.”

Eventually, we arrive at an “unofficial range” off a long desert road, where a red sign reads “Closed by order of the Federal Government.” Technically, we’re on BLM land. Of course, technically, there’s also nobody there to stop us.

The “unofficial range” resembles a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where remnants of bullet-riddled refrigerators, stolen cars, and more than a few home printers are scattered about. Several characters who appear to be extras from Breaking Bad brandish their firearms in all sorts of unorthodox ways, taking aim at whatever unfortunate appliance they’ve chosen for target practice. 

“Let’s get away from these idiots,” he says as we venture deeper into the desert. After about 20 minutes, we settled on a spot that looked like it was used for body disposal in Vegas’ previous life.

We burn through a couple of boxes of ammo each on the Colt M4 Civilian rifle and the Beretta, which are especially fun to shoot in this wide-open terrain. Cain shoots like a pro and still has hints of that first-shot thrill every time he pulls the trigger, smiling and laughing and yelling some version of “Hell yeah!” after he empties each magazine.

“You ready for this bad boy?” he says as he puts on his crossbody holster and loads the Desert Eagle. The holster is for effect; the gun’s power is not.

Saying the Desert Eagle has kick would be like saying the hills behind us could use some water. Cain takes his first shot, and the muzzle flips straight up into the sky, forcing the Man of Steel to step back.

“Holy f*****g s***!” he says. Then promptly unloads the rest of the magazine into the mountain.

Leaving the desert, the sky turns bright pink as the sun sets over Las Vegas. We stop to take photos in the Red Rock Conservation Area, about 30 minutes from the city. “I’m everywhere in half an hour,” Cain raves about life in Las Vegas. “In Malibu, it would take me two hours.” While we work, a pair of older Filipino individuals out for an evening stroll stop in their tracks. 

“Hey, you’re Superman!” the man says as he walks towards us. “Dean Cain!”

 Cain smiles, steps out of the shot, and walks over to shake the man’s hand.

“You want a picture of me with you and your wife?” he says.

“Oh no, that’s my sister. Nothing going on there. Not like you and Lois Lane,” the man jabs.

Cain smiles and raises his eyebrows, cocking his head as if to say, “I’m not gonna say anything was going on. But I’m not saying it wasn’t.”

As the first Asian American to play Superman, Cain has become somewhat of an icon in the Asian community. While he does not make his race his identity, he is proud to be the first minority to ever portray the Man of Steel—a fact that appears to have been overlooked in the 30 years since.

“There’s discussion of Michael B. Jordan being the first non-white Superman. And he’s a great actor and has every characteristic you’d need to play the Man of Steel,” Cain says. “But I kind of did that back in the ’90s. It just wasn’t the focal point of me playing the character.”

Race played a bigger part in Cain’s upbringing, though. His mother, Sharon, who he describes as “a force of nature,” left her Japanese-American husband on an Army base in Georgia while she was still pregnant, escaping to live with her Navy Commander father in Michigan. Three years later, she’d had enough of Detroit and was off to Hollywood, kids in tow.

“She was Miss Michigan Speedway, and she decided she was going to Hollywood to make her fortune,” he says. “She took her two little quarter Japanese kids, our name was Tanaka, and let’s just say racism was a lot stronger back then, especially against Asians.”

There, Sharon met and married actor Christopher Cain, who ultimately adopted Dean and his older brother.

“It’s kinda cliché to say but my dad’s my hero,” he says. “The stuff that he went through and the sacrifices he made to be my dad; he’s been the biggest influence in my life. He taught me how to be a father and how to be a man.”

Dean shares his experiences of growing up in a trailer in Malibu, where he counted the Penn family and other Hollywood notables among his best friends. His father directed Young Guns, but that’s not where his passion for firearms began. 

“How often do you get to shoot guns in Malibu? I’ll answer that: Not often,” he says. “But as I got older, I started to use firearms on set, and I realized I should really get to know about these things. I like the concentration; I like the ability to do things.”

Cain gained an even greater appreciation for firearms as a contestant on Stars Earn Stripes—produced by Dick Wolf and Mark Burnett—where celebrities were paired with special forces soldiers to complete high-intensity missions. Cain’s partner for his mission: American Sniper Chris Kyle.

“He was an unbelievable, super nice, super humble guy,” Cain recalls. “And he was a great mentor. We were there with 10 different kinds of firearms, at least, and I’d just listen to the conversations between him and General Wesley Clark, who commanded the forces in Kosovo.”

Inspired by his time with Kyle and the law enforcement officers on the show, Cain became a reserve police officer in Pocatello, Idaho, and later a sworn sheriff’s deputy in Frederick County, Virginia. Among his fellow Idaho officers is MMA legend Royce Gracie, whom Cain describes as one of the best shots he has ever seen. He then shows me a picture of himself putting Gracie in a chokehold. “I asked him if I could do it,” he points out quickly. “This is the only time you’re ever gonna see that.” 

Between his universal likeability, law enforcement credentials, and connections in politics, Cain seems like an obvious fit for public office. But he says he has no aspirations of running.

“I’ve been asked to run for Congress, Senate and Governor, but I don’t wanna deal with all that,” Cain says. “I wanna do what Pete (Hegseth) did, just get appointed to something and not have to deal with elections.”

Still, when he talks about America, it’s the kind of language that unites rather than divides, and if there was ever a time America needed Superman, it’s now.

“What brings us all together is our shared values,” he says. “Do you value your family? Do you respect the individual? Do you wanna have the ability to make enough money to take care of your friends and your family? That’s what people come here for, the freedoms we have as Americans. And I don’t care if you’re Pakistani or Israeli or Brazilian, I think America is the greatest country in the world. I believe in truth, justice, and the American way. I believe it so fully, I’d put it on a Desert Eagle.”  

If you could have one super-hero ability, which one would you choose?

Ability to fly, because I hate flying.

Superman only feared kryptonite, what’s your worst fear? 

I don’t like heights—being on manmade heights. I don’t mind being on top of a mountain, but don’t put me on a 100-story building.

Favorite dog breed? 

Rottweiler.

If you could only own one firearm for the rest of your life? 

Might be that Beretta 1301.

Any food or drink guilty pleasures to share? 

Potato chips, or really all potatoes in general.

Favorite movie you ever worked on?

Out of Time.

Favorite Hollywood personality?

I’m going with bipolar.

Least favorite Hollywood personality?

Didn’t we already answer that question?

Music preference for kicking back?

Depends on my mood. Soft country to George Winston Piano to old ’70s soft ballads.

All-time favorite movie?

It’s a Wonderful Life.

Who played Lois Lane the best (other than Teri Hatcher, obviously)?

Gonna go old school and say Margo Kidder.

Favorite Superman?

Christopher Reeve, then me.

Closer to Superman, you or Josh Allen?

Me, until Josh wins a Super Bowl.

Who would you rather date: Catwoman or Wonder Woman?

You f*** Catwoman, you marry Wonder Woman, you kill The Penguin.

If you were in a foxhole, who would you most want by your side (living or dead)?

Chris Kyle.

How many Super Bowls would the Buffalo Bills win if you never got injured?

Three (with a smile and a wink).