It was only a month ago that Warner Bros. Discovery was billing The Flash as “one of the greatest superhero movies ever”. This marketing tactic didn’t work out too well for them: the movie cratered at the box office and has now been quickly tossed onto digital. With that has come some closer scrutiny of the effects and story, but it seems one lingering mystery has been solved.
During the multiversal cameo parade in the finale, we see the original Jay Garrick Flash. It’s a brief glimpse, but many thought it looked like Teddy Sears, who played Garrick on The CW’s The Flash. Speculation mounted, with Sears eventually clarifying:
“I’m sleep-deprived with a newborn at home, so my memory is a little foggy. But I’m pretty sure I would have remembered shooting a major DC Studios film.”
Now we finally know who’s under the helmet. The Rough Cut podcast interviewed The Flash editor Jason Ballentine, who said:
“DJ, our visual effects supervisor, said, ‘Well, if we’re going to have a digital character that large on screen, then it would be better to have a real face just to help with the look of the shot.’ And so I stuck my hand up, my arm nearly flew off my shoulder, to volunteer to have an opportunity to have my face stuck on the original Flash.”
Over on Reddit fans just seem happy the debate is over, with several pointing out that The Flash‘s Jay Garrick is very obviously not Teddy Sears and that it’s strange the story kept propagating after he explicitly denied it. We suspect the widespread piracy of the movie and the blurriness of cam footage may be partly to blame for the confusion.
All that said, we’re jealous that Ballentine got to appear as Jay Garrick in a brief cameo, quietly staking a claim to first playing a true DC icon in live-action on the big screen.
The Flash is now available to buy and rent digitally.