Hawkgirl: who is Kendra Saunders, the winged heroine of Superman 2025?

Three heroines, one name

Hawkgirl is not one character, but a lineage. Three women have worn the name in DC comics, in three eras, with three incompatible origins. That's the first thing to know before you watch the film.

Shiera Sanders Hall (1940). The first appears in Flash Comics #1, created by Gardner Fox and Dennis Neville, alongside Hawkman. The pair rests on a reincarnation idea: Shiera and Carter Hall are the modern avatars of an Egyptian princess, Chay-Ara, and her husband, murdered in antiquity and condemned to be reborn.

Shayera Hol (1961). The second is an alien: a police officer from the planet Thanagar, come to Earth to hunt a criminal. It's this version, later renamed Hawkwoman because the word «girl» landed badly, that the animated series Justice League made famous in the early 2000s.

Kendra Saunders (1999). The third, the one in the film, is an American of Cuban origin. She's the one James Gunn chose, and her story is by far the darkest of the three.

This pile-up explains why viewers so often get confused: depending on your age and what you've read, «Hawkgirl» means a reincarnated archaeologist, an alien warrior, or an angry young woman. All three answers are right.

Kendra Saunders: a heroine born from a tragedy

Kendra Saunders first appears in August 1999 in JSA: Secret Files and Origins #1, created by James Robinson, David S. Goyer and Scott Benefiel, just as DC relaunches the Justice Society of America.

Her origin is brutal. Kendra is a young woman in deep pain, who takes her own life. Her body is then inhabited by the soul of her great-aunt Shiera Sanders Hall — the original Hawkgirl. Kendra wakes with her own memories, but also with the combat experience piled up over centuries of past lives.

It's her grandfather, the adventurer Speed Saunders, who steers her toward the costume. Kendra joins the Justice Society, learns the job, and refuses — that's the heart of the character — to meekly pick up the romance her past lives had with Hawkman.

That resistance makes her a modern heroine: she inherits a fate without accepting it. Where Shiera lived her reincarnation as an eternal love story, Kendra lives it as a chain she wants to break.

Nth metal: where the wings come from

Unlike Kara Zor-El or her cousin, Hawkgirl is not Kryptonian: her abilities come from a metal, Nth metal, of Thanagarian origin in the modern continuity.

This metal gives her three things:

• flight, through a harness the wings are fixed to;
• strength and durability, well above the human average, without reaching Kryptonian levels;
• accelerated healing, which is why she can take hits that would kill any human.

Add the lineage's weapon: a war mace, often Nth metal as well. That's an important style difference. Our list of Superman's powers shows a hero who needs no gear at all; Hawkgirl fights with a tool, and she hits to take people out.

The 2025 film respects that logic: her wings are heavy, metallic, noisy, and her flight has none of Superman's silent glide.

The Justice Gang of the 2025 film

In Superman from James Gunn, Hawkgirl doesn't act alone: she's part of a team the film nicknames the Justice Gang, alongside Guy Gardner, Mister Terrific and, off and on, Metamorpho.

What sets this team apart is the funding. It's neither government nor volunteer: it's sponsored by a billionaire, Maxwell Lord, played by Sean Gunn, whose company LordTech is framed as LuthorCorp's rival. The Hall of Justice belongs to a corporation, not the state.

This detail changes how you read the film. The Justice League of the comics is a meeting of wills; the Justice Gang is a product. Hawkgirl's job there is to execute, while Mister Terrific thinks and Guy Gardner talks too much.

Our feature on the Superman 2025 cast places each of these characters in the film as a whole.

Isabela Merced, the actress

Isabela Merced is born on 10 July 2001 in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Peruvian mother. She starts very young: at ten she is on Broadway in Evita, alongside Ricky Martin.

Television breaks her with the Nickelodeon series 100 Things to Do Before High School (2014-2016). Next come Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), Instant Family (2018) and the title role in Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019). In 2019 she changes her stage name from Moner to Merced, in tribute to her grandmother.

2024 and 2025 are the tipping-point years: Madame Web, Alien: Romulus, Turtles All the Way Down, then the role of Dina in season two of The Last of Us on HBO, before Hawkgirl.

That path explains her performance in the film: Merced is not trying to make Kendra likable. She plays her dry, rushed, annoyed by speeches — a pro in the middle of a group still finding itself.

The scene that split viewers

In the last act, Boravia's army invades Jarhanpur. The Justice Gang steps in, and Hawkgirl goes straight for the man in charge: Vasil Ghurkos, the Boravian president, whom she pulls from his embassy and carries into the air.

Ghurkos doesn't believe for a second that she'll drop him: he judges her too fragile, too much like Superman. Kendra's answer is three words — «I'm not Superman» — and she lets him go.

The scene started an argument. For part of the audience, it betrays the spirit of the film, which spends two hours defending a hero who doesn't kill. For the rest, it says the opposite: the DCU is fine with heroes who have different moral codes, and Superman is not the rule, he's the exception.

Our article on Superman's moral code lays out why that refusal to kill is, for him, a built choice and not a writing shortcut. Hawkgirl's decision only makes sense against that choice.

Hawkgirl before the film: television and animation

Most viewers know Hawkgirl mainly from the animated series Justice League (2001-2004), where it's the Thanagarian version, Shayera Hol, who is a founding member of the team. Her arc — the spy who betrays then chooses Earth — is still one of the series' peaks.

In live action, Kendra Saunders first appears in the Arrowverse: Ciara Renée plays her in Legends of Tomorrow in 2015-2016, with the reincarnation plot and Vandal Savage.

The 2025 film is therefore her first appearance in cinemas. Our list of Superman series places Justice League and the other animated productions in the timeline of adaptations.

One constant runs through these versions: Hawkgirl is always the most physical of the bunch. She arrives, she hits, she leaves. The 2025 film just pushes that further than the ones before.

What her character signals for what comes next

The film leaves the character with a problem: she has killed a head of state on camera, and the DCU world has not yet said what it thinks. The political fallout of that move is one of the threads a sequel can pull.

The rest depends on the calendar. Our feature on Man of Tomorrow, announced for July 2027, lays out what DC Studios has confirmed and what is still a rumor.

One thing is settled: in a handful of scenes, Hawkgirl became the character everyone talks about on the way out. Few supporting roles can say the same.

To understand this new era as a whole, our feature on James Gunn's Superman traces how the DCU has been built since 2022.

Conclusion

Hawkgirl arrived in the DCU through the side door — a supporting role in a secondary team — and came out as one of the most talked-about characters in the film. Kendra Saunders brings what Superman's universe rarely has: a heroine with neither the patience nor the principles of the Man of Steel.

To watch the films in the right order before the 2025 one, see our guide: what order to watch the Superman movies.

Her Nth-metal wings, her mace and her reincarnated past tie her to eighty years of comics. Her final move, though, belongs entirely to 2025.

To go further, our portrait of Mister Terrific covers the team's brain, and our analysis ofSuperman 2025 review comes back to the film as a whole.