When Henry Cavill was cast as Superman in 2011, most people were thrilled. His nephew Thomas was thrilled too, and he wanted everyone to know about it.
At school, during a “talk about your family” day, Thomas told his class: “My uncle is Superman.” His classmates were stunned. Nobody believed him. His teacher, less than impressed, told him plainly: “Thomas, we don’t lie in school.”
Thomas did not back down. “My uncle is Superman,” he insisted.
The teacher, now genuinely concerned, raised the issue with Thomas’s mother when she came to collect him that afternoon. She walked her through the whole incident, explaining that the school did not encourage children to make things up in front of their peers. Thomas’s mother listened patiently, then delivered the news as gently as she could.
“I hate to tell you this,” she said, “but it’s all true.”
Cavill told the story on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in June 2013, and it got so much mileage that he retold it on Live with Kelly and Ryan in 2018. Both times, audiences loved it for the same reason: Thomas never wavered. He knew what he knew, and no amount of adult skepticism was going to change it.
“My uncle is Superman” is not the kind of claim most teachers are prepared to receive. But from Thomas’s perspective, it was simply a fact about his life, one that happened to be harder to verify than most. As Cavill told the story, there was no drama, no grand reveal. Just a small boy, stubbornly telling the truth, and a mother who had to gently correct a teacher’s assumptions at school pickup.
The clip from the Live with Kelly and Ryan appearance has amassed over nine million views, with fans delighting in the specifics. “I hope the teacher replied by saying ‘I’m going to need you to prove that,’” one commenter wrote. “If my uncle was Superman I would brag about it every single day,” said another.
Thomas, for his part, appears to have handled the whole thing with exactly the composure you’d expect from someone whose uncle saves the world for a living.
This article originally appeared last year.
