Eric Johnson is Flash Gordon

Here are the very first stills of the new superhero series Flash Gordon starring Eric Johnson (Whitney from Smallville).

Johnson, 27, say down with Entertainment Weekly not too long ago to discuss his role as Flash Gordon and co-star Gina Holden as Dale Arden.

How much did you know about Flash Gordon before you started doing this? Zero to nothing. When I was a kid, I never got into comic books. I was too lost in my own fantasy world to be reading about others. My wife, she’s the comic book geek in our home. Like most people, I’d heard the name, but I wasn’t familiar with the mythos. I watched a variety of things – of course, the movie from 1980, and I saw some of the original serials that were done in the ’30s, and A&E actually did a biography of Flash Gordon, so they bought that online for me. Wikipedia helped. The Internet is full of information.

Did having a sort of fantasy/science-fiction background with Smallville help you figure out how to approach the character of Flash? Yeah, I mean, I think there is a certain hero archetype that you see in comics and in that world. Flash Gordon very much fits into that. You know, losing his father when he’s young. Having this desire to do the right thing and fight for the little guy. What I really like about Flash is he’s such a unique comic hero in that he has no superpowers. He’s a guy caught in extraordinary circumstances. That’s what I really responded to in this. He doesn’t have a trump card he can fall back on. Through sheer willpower and determination, he has to try and succeed. He becomes like the sports hero – the quarterback on the football field. You want that guy out there.

So is he like your character Whitney from Smallville – the football player? [Laughs] I think there is a similarity there, just a regular guy trying to do the right thing. People say, Oh, are you worried about getting stereotyped into this superhero genre?, and I say absolutely not, because I’m not playing one. I’m playing a regular guy. He’s far more Indiana Jones than he is Superman.

Read Johnson‘s full interview with EW here.

FYI: Eric is happily married to writer-producer Adria Budd Johnson as of August 7, 2004.

The series premiere of Flash Gordon is scheduled to air August 10 on the SciFi Network.