Erica Durance chats with Screen Rant about her journey as Lois Lane in the Smallville series, and celebrating the beloved DC TV drama through Creation Entertainment’s Salute To Smallville convention. Before the Arrowverse came to life on The CW, Tom Welling’s Smallville was the network’s flagship superhero show following the merger between The WB and UPN in 2006. Set before becoming the Man of Steel, Smallville served as the ultimate Clark Kent origin story, showing him coming to terms with his powers and Kryptonian heritage.
While the comic book TV genre has come a long way since 2011, Smallville is still the longest-running superhero series of all time after being on the air for a full decade. 23 years after Smallville’s debut in 2001, the iconic DC property is still being honored and celebrated to this day, with new fans constantly finding the show through streaming or Blu-ray/DVD. In the current age of convention circuits, the Smallville cast has been meeting fans from all over the world and looking back on their time with the series.
This weekend, Welling, Durance, Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor), Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang), Aaron Ashmore (Jimmy Olsen), Laura Vandervoort (Kara Zor-El/Supergirl), and John Glover (John Glover) will be taking part in the first-ever-exclusive Smallville-themed convention, Salute To Smallville, from Creation Entertainment. Screen Rant had the honor of interviewing Durance ahead of the event as she shares her love for the Smallville fandom, the bonds she still has with the cast, and the impact her version of Lois has on people. Durance also opens up more about her return to the Superman mythology with Arrowverse’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, her hopes for the Smallville animated TV sequel, and more.
Erica Durance Reflects On Her Time As Lois Lane In Smallville
Screen Rant: First of all, I have always wanted to say that for the last 20 years, you are the Lois Lane that made me want to become a reporter to begin with. So thank you for everything you did with Lois.
Erica Durance: Oh my goodness, that’s very sweet! I was so lucky to be part of it and I’m glad there are really wonderful and intelligent people that are out there getting the story, so good for you!
What do you think still stands out about this particular version of Superman and all the characters you guys have explored? Why do you think Smallville still stands out to this day?
Erica Durance: I think, ultimately, people want to see themselves represented out there and for a lot of people that have come to speak with us, what they loved about Clark and Lois and the different characters in the show is that they were flawed, that there was something that they were struggling with. This is an origin story of Superman, everybody loves Superman because it’s the good guy wins, he’s honorable and wonderful and protective of his woman. She’s strong and independent. People love those scenes, and it’s wholesome and beautiful. But I think with Smallville, [what] was great was that it was the origin story. It was about all of these people finding themselves and being flawed or being outcast or having that lack of perfection, and yet they still did what they believed was the right thing. They still fought for things, and they had a great amount of courage, so I think that people really found that heartwarming, and it gives them a place where they feel they belong.
Erica Durance On Connecting To The Smallville Cast & Audience 13 Years After The Series Finale
“Everybody wants to kind of have a sense of purpose.”
Something that’s also been so great seeing over the last few years is how close you guys in the cast still are. I love it whenever you show up on Inside of You or Talk Ville. What’s so fun now about this, even though the show is over, does it help that we live in this more social media world, in terms of honoring the show, that you get to add now that you maybe didn’t have when you were shooting the show? Because, I’m guessing, shooting 18 hours a day for nine months a year probably limits it a little?
Erica Durance: I think what I like now that we have is a little more accessibility. I love going to the cons. I love meeting people, chatting with them, chatting about their experiences. Of course, seeing my friends and I love to be able to do that, but we can’t always do that. So the way things are set up now we can actually have other ways of interacting. There’s the stream release as well, where they can watch you live signing, and you can talk to them and you just feel like you’re able to reach out and meet more people and connect on this love for the show.
For fans, like myself, do you have fans coming up to you and telling you had an impact on them in pursuing a career in journalism, and if so, what does that mean to you?
Erica Durance: It means a lot and it does still happen again, which I find pleasantly surprising! It has been a really long time since that show was on. I knew when I was on it, I joined a couple of years in, so I already knew it was something that was quite incredible and really, really special that I was getting to be a part of. I had assumed something would happen from that experience, that it would have some longevity.
But I had no idea [it would] have this kind of longevity. For me, when people come up and say, ‘Hey, this thing that you’ve done, your interpretation of this character, I watched it. I watched it with my dad, my grandpa, my kid.’ I’ve had people say, ‘It helped me through moments, that were very, very difficult, and it gave me a solace and a respite from that experience. It’s motivated me to be a journalist. It’s helped me to be who I am,’ and for me, I think I’m going to speak for a lot of other actors, we often feel like what we do is kind of in this strange vacuum, and maybe doesn’t really have that much impact, right? It’s not until later that somebody comes up and talks and said, ‘Hey, I watched this thing.’
Because none of us take ourselves so seriously to the point that we’re going to assume that’s going to be an actual fact, do you know what I mean? So when you actually get feedback from people, you go, ‘Oh, okay, maybe that stuff I did mattered! Of course, everybody wants to kind of have a sense of purpose, but they did something that made a positive impact so yeah, it’s pretty amazing.
Creation Entertainment’s Salute To Smallville Is A Unique Experience
This weekend, you guys are heading up to New Jersey for the first-ever Smallville-themed convention, I wish I could have been there, but hopefully, maybe next year. You’ve been doing the convention circle now for for quite a while, how exciting is it to be able to heading to an event where you guys are the core reason why people are going, there?
Erica Durance: It’s bizarre – I don’t like too much attention, so I’ll deflect and also honestly say it has a lot to do with Welling as well, like it’s just about those guys [laughs] It’s pretty special and we enjoy being able to get out, like I said, and meet people and and sit back and and rehash old days. But to have an event that’s all just basically there for Smallville is quite something.
Erica Durance On Bonding More With The Women Of Smallville
“I have created much deeper relationships with those girls, and we’re very close.”
I always love the fact that, even though we didn’t get to see a lot of it on the show, I love that now that all the actresses get to now engage more with each other that we didn’t get to see on the show as much. Has it been rewarding getting to bond more with your female co-stars? Because even though the show is primarily through Clark’s point of view, we had all these amazing women with their stories through 10 years.
Erica Durance: We laugh about it, we think it’s quite funny. We always said that if we met too many times, doing the same scene, their their universe would explode so they didn’t know what to do with that, unless we were fighting. They didn’t know how to write it, unless we had some kind of level of level of conflict and I don’t say that disparagingly, but that was part of the process, right? It was all these different people that like Clark and then there’s only so many times you can do that scene, so they were pretty limited.
But I know since the show, I have created much deeper relationships with those girls, and we’re very close, and we see each other as often as we can. I just finished doing an episode on one of Kristin [Kreuk’s] shows, which was amazing. I felt like I was 20 again [laughs] and it’s really special to see how you end up continuing to connect in your relationship.
What Could Lois Lane’s Role In Tom Welling & Michael Rosenbaum’s Smallville Animated Sequel Show Be?
Something I know that Michael and Tom have talked a lot about is this little animated sequel that they are trying to make happen, which I know me and a lot of Smallville fans are hoping very much happens. I know you’ve talked about that, if it happens, you would be involved. What are things that you would want to explore with Lois after all these years if the show were to come back?
Erica Durance: I’d love to have explored where she would have gone further in her career. Whether it was for her to be a mother, how she balanced all of that. I’d like to delve a little more into her past, her experiences with her dad, and how her upbringing shaped her a little bit more and just seeing her grow into into another person, a grown up version of herself. But I’d love to keep her complicated and full of conflict and not always doing the right thing and not always saying the right thing, because there’s more people like that out there, I think, in the world, than the ones that seem to be super slick.
Erica Durance On Returning As Smallville’s Lois Lane In Arrowverse’s Crisis On Infinite Earths
“She would be quite a force to be reckoned with as a mom.”
When you came back forward for Crisis, and we found out that Lois and Clark are parents – in your viewpoint, what do you think Lois is like as a mom? How do you think she juggles all of that?
Erica Durance: Yeah, I think she’s very intense. I think she’s probably somewhat impatient. I think she’s fierce and protective of her kids, but demands a lot of them and and wants to teach them how to be resilient and strong. I like to think she’d have a bit of a sense of humor, and probably they would all gang up on Clark sometimes! [laughs] I think that would be fun, but yeah, I like to think that she would be quite a force to be reckoned with as a mom, for sure.
Erica Durance On James Gunn’s DC Universe Franchise
You’re no stranger to taking on multiple DC roles. I loved seeing you on Supergirl, which was so fun because you got to have powers, a suit, and all those things. Outside of Smallville, is this a genre that you would love to keep exploring? If, for example, you were offered something in James Gunn’s new DC Universe, would you love to take part in that in some kind of way?
Erica Durance: Of course I would! It’s a fun, fun world to be in this superhero/fantasy/sci-fi-mishmash. I would want something that had aspects of all different kinds of things going on. But I, personally as a viewer, enjoy those shows a lot so to be able to be part of something like that again, would be a really great experience.
Smallville’s Impact On The DCTV Genre Is No Small Thing
When you were doing Crisis, where you were not just there for Supergirl, but also playing Lois again: how was it seeing where there’s this era of DC superheroes? Because in a lot of ways, Smallville did pave the way for all these shows to become a reality because of your success.
Erica Durance: I look back on it with just a lot of gratitude to have been able to be a part of it. Al [Gough] and Miles [Millar] came up with just such a wonderful concept of let’s see the origin story of the superhero and I think that it was brilliant, and I feel honored to be a part of something that helped launch all of these other really, really cool shows and different way of storytelling.
Durance Still Follows Superman In Other Movies & TV Shows After Smallville
Outside of Smallville, have you been keeping up with how Superman and that world are depicted in other iterations in recent movies? How do you feel, for you seeing as just as a fan, even though you’ve been part of that world?
Erica Durance: It’s interesting. I don’t really think of myself when I’m watching it, I’m just kind of watching it. I like that when the stories get a little bit grittier [that] I like to see. There was one show [where] Batman and Superman were fighting and they were mad at each other, or Batman was really mad at Superman, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a neat story to tell,’ and my kids love to watch it. Everything gets better, in the sense of the CGI, the storytelling is a little more complex and so I enjoyed that quite a bit.
What Is Next For Smallville’s Erica Durance?
Outside of getting ready for Salute to Smallville, what are you working on next? Where can people see you or hear you next?
Erica Durance: I always put out a couple of Hallmarks in a year, so I did a couple for this year as well that’ll be coming out at Christmas. They’re a little bit of a departure for me, because I get to play more of the character side of it, which is quite different So I got to do something where I was playing a housewife in the 1960s and I’m currently playing, the Queen Mother of a fantasy world and land, so I’m getting to explore a whole other world for myself in acting. I have an accent, I have a lot of other technical things that I have to do, so I stepped off and out of my comfort zone a little bit this year, so I’m looking forward to that being out. Then I did Kristin’s show [Murder in a Small Town] this year too, a character that was a little bit outside the ballpark for me and demanded a little more emotionally for me, so yeah, it’s been a good year all in all.
More About Smallville (2001)
After a meteor shower bursts from the heavens, raining destruction on the unsuspecting citizens of Smallville, years pass, and the healing process leaves the town’s inhabitants with scars and secrets. From the ashes of tragedy, a popular yet awkward teen attempts to decipher the meaning of his life and his clouded past. As he struggles with the transition from boyhood to adulthood, Clark finds that his strength and strange abilities set him uncomfortably apart from his peers.
Check out Screen Rant’s interviews with other Smallville actors:
Salute to Smallville
starts this weekend, October 5-6, at the Hilton Parsippany Hotel in New Jersey.
