The latest episode of the Tom Welling-Michael Rosenbaum Smallville podcast TalkVille went out this week, and in it, Michael asks the show’s creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar two questions that fans have speculated about for decades… with, perhaps, a surprise answer in one of those cases.
Let’s start with the headline-grabber: In the Smallville Season 3 episode “Delete,” Chloe uses the name “Lois Lane” as a byline, which fueled the fan fires that “Chlois” – the theory that Allison Mack’s character Chloe Sullivan would somehow or someday change her name to Lois Lane – was a direction the show would ultimately be taking. On the podcast, Michael Rosenbaum asked the producers if this was something that was actually considered.
“We did talk about that, that maybe she is the proto-Lois and that later on, she had to change her identity or something like that, and she becomes Lois Lane,” Miles Millar answered.
“The issue, again, was we wanted to get Lois Lane, and they wouldn’t give her to us,” Al Gough added, before speaking a bit about other conflicts the show had with the movie division of Warner Bros. “Then when she came in in Season 4, there was this huge thing about ‘you can have her for two episodes,’ and then ‘you can have her for three,’ and then ‘you can have her for half the season’ and [WBTV head] Peter Roth, to his credit, was like ‘f— it. She’s in the show now and she’s just not leaving’,” he continued.
“She became part of the show. It was never questioned again,” Miles said, with Al Gough adding that Lois Lane actress Erica Durance was “fantastic.”
It isn’t known when the possibility of actually doing “Chlois” had been discussed on the show. The notion that Chloe Sullivan was Lois Lane’s cousin was officially confirmed, almost accidentally by Miles Millar at the San Diego Comic-Con panel for Smallville in 2002. Prior to that, the writer of this very article had been told before the pilot even filmed that “Chloe is Lois Lane’s cousin.” In doing an interview for Smallville: The Official Companion Season 7 (also by me), Al Gough reiterated that the show would not end with “Chlois.”
“Chloe, from the inception of the show, was always Lois’s cousin,” he said. “It might have even been in the pilot script. The idea that she was going to turn into Lois was never going to happen.”
UPDATE: We went to Smallville co-creator Alfred Gough for clarification on when “Chloe Sullivan might be Lois Lane” was considered, and we have an answer: “We discussed it when we were developing the show in mid 2000, but even in the series pitch document Lois was her cousin,” he responded to KryptonSite exclusively.
On a similar note, Michael also asked if Ian Somerhalder’s Adam Knight character was supposed to be Bruce Wayne — something that was actually a KryptonSite April Fool only a few months before Somerhalder’s actual casting. It sounds like that one was a for-sure “no.”
“[Bruce Wayne] was a name we were clearly trying to put out there, but we but we could never get Batman. At that point, it was off the table, because [Christopher] Nolan was in literally making Batman Begins at this point,” Gough said. (You can read more about Al and Miles trying to get Bruce Wayne in their 20th anniversary interview here at KryptonSite).
What do you all think? Did the tens of thousands of KryptonSite Forum Chlois posts actually move the needle, or was this just a passing notion, like “wouldn’t it be cool if….?” We may never know, but you can see the Gough/Millar TalkVille episode below, where you can get some great insights into the “Memoria” episode that Miles directed. Enjoy!