The Trades talked to Eric Martsolf about his guest appearance as Booster Gold in Smallville. Here are the highlights.
So how did you come by the part of Booster Gold? Were you approached for it?
I was definitely approached for this. The casting department of Smallville had seen me for the Hawkman role, actually, a couple of months before. When Booster Gold came to town, they gave me a call and asked me to come in.
So I came into the room guns-blazing: I had a pair of glasses that were reminescent of the character; I pretty much went in there exactly the way I thought this guy would market himself. And they were sold. They said, “Yep, that’s him.”
Can you tell us how you went about becoming the character of Booster Gold?
It’s funny, when I first started reading the script, he came across to me as sort of a Ron Burgundy from “Anchorman” — just this ultra-comedic confidence man, and it was very questionable as to whether he had it all together or not. I wasn’t sure whether this guy was all style and no substance. But when you dig further into the character, and further into the script, you realize this basically is just a misunderstood man that is the product of a very awful childhood. He had many things that he had to overcome, and he eventually turns to becoming a superhero as a way out.
It’s a really wonderful lesson about the human condition. We all are fallible as human beings, and Booster Gold is interesting in that he is completely fallible and has issues. He is definitely not above being wrong and doing immoral things. So he’s a complex character that way. There’s really not an easy way to put it. [Writer] Geoff [Johns] just does a wonderful job in showing the compexities of this particular superhero.
Soap Opera Digest also talked to Eric about his role as Booster Gold.
“Booster is a symbol for accepting and embracing your marketability,” Martsolf details. “His whole platform is to stick around after you save somebody — as opposed to the classic superhero, whose behavior is to fly away once the crime is stopped. Booster is all about sticking around for the photo-op. He has sponsorships all over his uniform. Whenever he solves crimes, he gets sponsorships.” Clark Kent, meanwhile, “prefers to be a hero and then step into the shadows. He refers to himself as the Blur This episode serves as a vehicle for Clark to accept himself as a hero and to embrace the red-and-blue. Booster basically says, ‘Clark, man up, and put on the spandex!’”
