[The following contains vague spoilers for The Flash (movie) and The Flash (TV show)]
If you’re one of the vast majority of Americans who did not go see The Flash this weekend but still wanted to read spoilers about its already infamous deluge of weird, CG-heavy cameo appearances, you may have heard that actor Teddy Sears shows up as Jay Garrick—a.k.a. the first Flash from the comics, with the Hermes hat and stuff—reprising a role he played on The CW’s Flash TV show.
The thing about this cameo is that it doesn’t make a lick of goddamn sense: Not only are the other cameos mostly references to DC superhero movies, but Sears didn’t even really play Jay Garrick on The Flash. He was a villain pretending to be Jay Garrick. So they threw in one cameo from the hit Flash TV show, where Ezra Miller’s version of the Flash canonically got the name “the Flash” when he made a cameo of his own, and they chose a confusing fake version of a different character and and not Grant Gustin, the freakin’ Flash himself?
Well, here’s the other thing about that cameo: It’s not Teddy Sears at all. It is, as TVLine puts it, “no actor of note” (take that, unnamed actor). TVLine talked to Sears himself who said that it sure “looks like” his face, but it’s not. He said that people kept telling him he was in the new Flash movie, but, he says, “I’m pretty sure I would have remembered shooting a major DC Studios film.” TVLine says “well-placed sources” on both the TV and film side of DC confirm that it’s also “absolutely not archival footage” of Sears on The Flash, meaning he didn’t film anything new and they didn’t reuse anything old—so it’s definitely not Teddy Sears.
Which actually makes the cameo even more bizarre. The other cameos are famous people in famous roles, with archival footage and one big CG inside joke for superhero movie nerds, but then they just went ahead and picked some guy for some other version of the Flash? James Gunn is co-running DC Studios now, surely he could’ve put his feelings about the Arrowverse aside for an actual cameo from Grant Gustin if they wanted another famous version of the Flash, or pull a Spider-Verse and merge live-action and animation for a cameo from Michael Rosenabum’s Flash.
Someone is going to write a book about the Flash movie at some point, and we’re excited for the chapter on this one specific thing.
