Dean Cain took aim at Milly Alcock’s appearance after the newly released poster for her upcoming Supergirl film appeared online, turning a routine promotional image into a fast-moving argument across social media. The 59-year-old former Superman actor mocked the 29-year-old star and kept weighing in as the thread grew.
The reason the exchange caught fire today is that it did not stay a one-off jab. One X user asked how Supergirl could have pierced ears if her skin is bulletproof like Superman’s, and Cain amplified a post comparing Alcock to Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost before replying, “Dang it... I laughed.” By Sunday, he had already begun replying to or reposting posts in the Supergirl thread, and two days later he had touched at least 30 posts, keeping the pile-on alive long after the first joke landed.
James Gunn stepped in on Threads to shut down the pierced-ear chatter. “As explained in Superman, the same way she gets drunk—she goes to a planet with a red sun. Not to mention, she was raised on a chunk of Krypton, so didn’t even experience superpowers until her teens,” he wrote. It was a tidy explanation for a detail that had somehow become the center of the conversation, but it did not slow the online reaction around Alcock’s image.
That reaction also sharpened the contrast around Cain himself. He has faced criticism before over comments about race and identity, including backlash and racist nicknames tied to his Japanese ancestry, yet he still jumped into a thread that mocked a younger actress’s looks. The irony was hard to miss for users following along, especially from a man whose X bio still carries Superman’s motto, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”
Cain’s profile has long mixed superhero nostalgia with overt politics. He endorsed and voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections and later joined ICE as an “honorary” officer, while also calling Alex Pretti, who was killed by ICE officers in January, “asking for trouble.” For now, what matters is that the Supergirl thread has become more than a one-off internet barb: Cain keeps returning to it, and the unanswered question is why he is still feeding the conversation instead of letting it fade.
