Three Reasons Ezra Miller Is Such An Interesting Choice To Play The Flash

Any other day, the casting of someone to play the Flash would have been the DC movie news of the day. Alas, the scoop on Ezra Miller getting chosen to portray the Fastest Man Alive ont he big screen kind of got buried just a bit earlier this week, coming as it did at the same time Warner Bros. was confirming a whole bunch of super hero movies.

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There are still a lot more details to learn — not the least of which is exactly which Flash Miller will be playing, since there have been several — but it’s not too early to discuss exactly why Miller is such an intriguing choice. The short version is that he doesn’t fit the typical mold of an actor chosen to play a super hero, but we’ll go ahead and break down the three reasons he could be a breath of fresh air for the genre:

• His acting background is different

Not everyone cast as a notable super hero has a history of leading man roles beforehand, but Miller is making a huge leap up in terms of his profile. He’s only 22, but he’s been acting since he was a child in both TV shows and films.

Despite his relative inexperience, Miller already has earned praise for his acting in character-focused movies like We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When you get actors coming from smaller projects and put them into blockbusters, they can either be wrong for those kinds of movies or bring something special to what could otherwise be rather ordinary roles. If it’s the latter with Miller, Warner Bros. should be very happy.

• He’s not a physically imposing guy

And that’s just fine for this part. The Flash is a runner; ideally, he shouldn’t look all that musclebound. For example, I love Ethan Van Sciver, but the way he drew The Flash: Rebirth made it look like Barry Allen spent all his time dead in the Speed Force lifting weights at super speed.

A better example of how Flash should look compared to his fellow heroes is in the current “Endgame” arc in Batman, where Greg Capullo draws Allen with a noticeably thinner frame than Batman, Superman or Aquaman. Whether he ends up cast as Allen or Wally West, Miller looks like someone who fights crime by zipping around of slugging it out.

• He’s the first openly gay actor to play a major super hero

His own description of his sexuality would make him bisexual if we’re trying to go for labels, but that’s really not the point. Nor do his proclivities have any effect on his ability to do a good job in the part.

Still, it would be silly not to acknowledge the fact that this is significant, if only in the sense that there was a time, probably not that long ago, that Miller’s openness would have excluded him from landing this kind of role. Times have changed, and for the better in this case.

The question now is when we’ll first see Miller as the Flash. He hasn’t been announced yet for either Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice or the Justice League movie that is slated for 2017, but it would be hard to imagine him just gong right to a solo film. Expect to see him sooner rather than later and to see if we’re right to be hopeful that his casting was a good one.