'I'm nodding my head, but I'm thinking, What curse?' claims that actor. 'To me it means nothing.'

SAN FRANCISCO -- You might remember Brandon Routh from fleeting appearances on "Cold Case" and "Oliver Beene" and "Will & Grace," but you probably don't. Even soap opera fans weren't sure what to think when the "One Life to Live" veteran beat out nearly every young actor in Hollywood for the lead role in Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns."

"I was surprised, but I wasn't shocked," Routh tells the crowd at San Francisco's WonderCon. "It felt like the right thing. It felt like the way it was going to happen. And Bryan made it very, very easy for me to not get scared out of my mind that I was going to be Superman when I'd done not much else."

Singer has said that he knew Routh was the man for the job, but didn't tell anybody for several months as he worked through the character with the 26-year-old actor in mind.

"For me the actor would always be unknown," Singer insists.

He adds, "The character of Superman to me -- more so than even X-Men, Spider-Man or Batman even -- is, to me, so much larger than any particular actor. He also has to feel as if he stepped out of your collective memory of who that character is."

Suddenly Routh is on the cover of countless national magazines, a familiar face even if people don't exactly know who he is or whether or not he's any good at his job. Naturally, the Iowa-born actor is just feeling grateful at this point.

"I'm blessed that this character is the first I get to play in the first film that I've been in, I get to be such an inspirational character that everybody in the world can appreciate and love and aspire to be as much like him as they can be," he gushes.

Of course, being Superman doesn't just mean wearing tights, saving the girl and flying back to a Fortress of Solitude. It means fielding questions from enthusiastic fans about things like the so-called "Superman Curse," which presumably references the misfortunes that befell previous Men of Steel like Christopher Reeve and George Reeves.

"I'm nodding my head, but I'm thinking, 'What curse?'" claims Routh. "To me it means nothing. There are a lot of things that happened to people, but I don't think of it as a curse."

Routh is still very respectful of the Reeve's legacy and the general Superman legacy.

"Through these different people -- not only actors, but artists who have drawn him and writers who written for him, all these different incarnations of Superman -- he's grown and he grows and each artist, whether it's somebody drawing it or an actor portraying it, each artist puts their own twist on it. But they take what everybody else did," he says.

He adds, "So Chris to me was my biggest influence, so of course there's that presence that was there. He is part of it because my portrayal was based on him as much as his was based on everybody else's."

Routh's "Superman Returns" flies into theaters on Friday, June 30.