By Ed Power
Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s a former Superman who has emerged as one of Donald Trump’s highest-flying celebrity supporters and has now embarked on an unlikely new career rounding up migrants with the controversial ICE agency.
It’s Dean Cain, AKA Maga-man.
In the 1990s, Cain was the Hollywood hunk who ruled primetime TV. Playing Superman/Clark Kent in the romantic comedy series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures, he helped put the phwoar in super hero, opposite the equally popular Teri Hatcher.
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It’s hard to overstate just how big a deal Lois & Clark became – imagine a Marvel movie crossed with Love Island and multiplied by Sex and the City. Lois & Clark was everywhere, and if Hatcher was the face of the show, Cain brought the pecs appeal.
Thirty years later, however, he is on the verge of swapping Superman’s iconic blue spandex for the sinister head-to-toe black of an ICE uniform.
ICE has been accused of human rights violations and of abandoning due process as part of Donald Trump’s war on illegal immigration. And this week it has a new champion in Cain, 59, who already has experience in law enforcement, US-style, as a deputy sheriff in Frederick, Virginia, and a reserve police officer in St Anthony, Idaho.
He explains that he was motivated to sign up as an anti-immigration officer after putting out an ICE information video and receiving positive feedback from Trump supporters.
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“We have a broken immigration system,” Cain told Fox News, the US network on which he is a regular pundit.
“Congress needs to fix it, but in the interim, President Trump ran on this. He is delivering on this. This is what people voted for. It’s what I voted for, and he’s going to see it through, and I’ll do my part and help make sure it happens.”
Cain isn’t the only high-profile actor to “out themselves” – as Hollywood sees it – as a Trump supporter. It is a club that also includes Jon Voight, Shazam’s Zachary Levi and Stephen Baldwin.
The difference is that Cain has done so while retaining the everyman, aw-shucks qualities that made him so adored on Lois & Clark. In his appearance on Fox News, for instance, he is avuncular and at pains to sound reasonable.
But then, he has never been a cardboard cut-out conservative.
“Everybody thinks I’m a Republican. I don’t ever vote party lines,” he told the Washington Post in 2019. “I voted for Bill Clinton twice. I voted for Al Gore – you know, I would definitely take that vote back. But I vote candidates and I vote issues.”
He was speaking to the newspaper shortly after appearing in a controversial play, FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers, adapted from the bizarre text messages exchanged by two FBI officers investigating claims of Russian interference in Trump’s successful 2016 election run – a production described as “Hamilton for the Maga crowd”.
Cain impressed as agent Peter Strzok, even though he’d had just a few days to prepare (it was his idea to have Strzok rip open his shirt, Superman style). He enjoyed himself, but was upfront that being perceived as Right-wing had damaged him in Hollywood.
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“I’m sure it’s negatively impacted it. Look, I mean, when I listen to Robert De Niro step on the stage at the Tonys and say, ‘f— Trump’ and then get a standing ovation, that’s disgusting to me,” he said.
“I think he’s a great actor, but I think that’s just ridiculous. And Alec Baldwin – I’ve always liked Alec. We don’t agree on almost anything, but I actually like the guy. I’ll watch him in anything, even his Trump thing, even though it’s a little bit over the top.
“And you know, by the way, this tonight was sort of a Saturday Night Live thing. Why aren’t they [SNL] making fun of Strzok and Page?”
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Cain became a deputy sheriff in 2021, motivated by what he regarded as an unfair backlash against the forces of law and order as part of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“Policing is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I know so many people … on the front lines all the time. These are great people by and large … I want to stand up and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with law enforcement. Often, when I’m defining law enforcement, people would say … ‘Why don’t you join up if you care so much?’ So I did.”
It’s been quite a journey for Cain, who is of mixed-race background; his father, Roger Tanaka, is of Japanese descent. Cain was born in 1966 on an air force base in Michigan. However, his parents’ marriage foundered soon afterwards, and his mother, actress Sharon Thomas, moved the family to California, where she married film director Christopher Cain.
Cain never knew his father and remained estranged until Tanaka died in 2011.
“He’s not the kind of man I want to be,” said Cain. “He was an unfaithful husband and not much of a father.”
Aptly for an actor who would become famous for playing a Stars and Stripes hero, Cain had an All-American upbringing.
He attended Santa Monica High School, where classmates included Charlie Sheen and Rob Lowe, and played American football at Princeton University, where he dated Brooke Shields. An NFL career beckoned until he suffered a serious knee injury and turned to acting, where he quickly achieved pin-up status with Lois & Clark.
He and Hatcher had fantastic chemistry, but they were never involved romantically. Cain was aware of his co-star’s reputation for being hard to work with, but did his best to get along with her. “Sometimes [it was] the greatest thing in the world and sometimes a lot more difficult.”
“There were times where we had great chemistry. There were times where it was just the easiest thing in the world,” he said. “I’m a team guy. I’m real simple. Plug me in and let’s go. I’m here to get this done as fast as we can.”
Lois & Clark was never going to be mistaken for The Sopranos, and Cain was regarded as disposable beefcake.
But he is a solid actor, as he demonstrated with a impressive guest turn on the 2023 Emma Stone-Nathan Fielder black comedy The Curse, in which he plays a prospective house buyer whose car has a “Blue Lives Matter” sticker supporting the police – a red flag for American progressives.
The twist is that Mark isn’t a caricature Right-winger – he’s affable and passionate about minority rights, and has strong feelings about law and order. It’s as if people can have different views about a variety of subjects without becoming hateful human beings.
Many of Hollywood’s Maga set can seem a few lines short of a finished script – for instance, the reactionary Voight or the eccentric Levi. Cain, though, has always maintained a reasonable tone.
But is joining ICE a step too far? He’s already had a controversial summer, clashing with new Superman movie director James Gunn’s assertion that the man in blue is defined by his status as an immigrant. Superman, said Cain, represented “truth, Justice and the American way”. It may well prove kryptonite for his Hollywood career.
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