Melissa Benoist: the TV Supergirl who wore the cape for six seasons

Before the cape: Glee and Whiplash

Melissa Marie Benoist was born on October 4, 1988. Before becoming the Kara Zor-El with the longest screen run in the history of the adaptations, she was first a musical theater actress, trained in singing and dancing, which explains a good part of what followed.

The general public discovered her in Glee, Fox's musical series, where she played Marley Rose between 2012 and 2014. The role is that of a shy, gifted, somewhat withdrawn high schooler — a part that, in hindsight, looks a lot like the Kara Danvers she would play three years later.

In 2014, she appeared in Whiplash, Damien Chazelle's film about a young jazz drummer pushed to the brink by his teacher. Her role is a supporting one, but the film is a major critical success, and it gave her a visibility in cinema that a teen series couldn't offer her. She followed up in 2015 with Danny Collins, alongside Al Pacino.

At this stage, nothing particularly destined her for superheroes. That's precisely what interested the producers: they weren't looking for an athlete or an action star, but for an actress able to embody the warmth and awkwardness of a young woman learning to become a heroine.

The Supergirl casting in 2015

When Greg Berlanti, Ali Adler and Andrew Kreisberg developed Supergirl for CBS, the bet was risky. In 2015, no superheroine series had yet gone the distance on a major American network, and Superman's cousin remained, for the general public, a secondary character.

The choice of Melissa Benoist breaks with expectations. She doesn't have the sculpted physique associated with the superhero movies of the time; she does have an immediately likable presence, a disarming smile and an ability to move from comedy to emotion without a seam. That's exactly what a character conceived as a blend of optimism and vulnerability called for.

The first episode aired on CBS on October 26, 2015. From the opening minutes, the series announces its tone: Kara isn't a tormented warrior, she's an overwhelmed assistant who finally decides to use her powers out in the open. Our article on differences between Supergirl and Superman looks back at what sets the two cousins apart in the comics; the series, for its part, makes this difference in temperament its engine.

Her Kara Danvers: a sunny heroine

What's striking in Melissa Benoist's performance is that she plays two characters without ever giving the impression of playing one of them badly. Kara Danvers, the assistant and later journalist of National City, is nervous, chatty, a little clumsy. Supergirl, on the other hand, stands tall, speaks less and looks her opponents in the eye.

The transition between the two comes through details: the glasses, obviously, but also the voice, which drops a tone, and the shoulders, which open up. It's the same mechanism as Clark Kent's, transposed to an actress who comes from musical theater and knows how to use her body.

Three traits recur across the entire run of the series:

• Optimism : Kara sincerely believes that people can change, including her enemies
• Restrained anger : unlike her cousin, she knew Krypton and carries a wound from it that the series regularly draws on
• The relationship to family : her adoptive sister Alex Danvers, played by Chyler Leigh, is the show's true emotional heart

This nuanced acting explains why the series could last six seasons with a character many initially judged too bland: Melissa Benoist made that kindness credible, and therefore interesting.

From CBS to The CW: six seasons and 126 episodes

The first season, twenty episodes aired on CBS between October 26, 2015 and April 18, 2016, is a critical success but expensive for a broadcast network. From the second season on, the series moves to The CW, the network already home to Arrow and The Flash. This transfer changes everything: Supergirl fully joins the Arrowverse and gains annual crossovers with the network's other heroes.

The move also has a visible consequence: filming leaves Los Angeles for Vancouver, and the series adopts an aesthetic closer to its neighbors. Fans notice that National City changes its look slightly; the essentials, the tone and the cast, stay in place.

In total, the series runs six seasons and 126 episodes. The final season aired from March 30 to November 9, 2021, with a finale that brings together a large part of the historic characters. To place Supergirl among the other shows in the universe, our complete list of Superman series puts it back in the timeline.

Around Melissa Benoist, the cast did a lot for the show's longevity: Calista Flockhart as Cat Grant, the formidable boss of the first season, David Harewood as J'onn J'onzz, Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, and Katie McGrath as Lena Luthor, whose ambiguous friendship with Kara became one of the series' through-lines.

Her on-screen meetings with Superman

A series about Superman's cousin couldn't avoid the question of the cousin. The first season deliberately keeps him off-screen: we glimpse him from afar, we exchange messages with him, but his face never appears. The choice is clever: it establishes Kara as a heroine in her own right without putting her in competition.

It's with the arrival on The CW that Superman really enters the scene, played by Tyler Hoechlin. The scenes between the two cousins are among the most appreciated in the series: they show a warm, almost brotherly Kal-El, who treats Kara as an equal rather than an apprentice.

This dynamic was later extended in Superman & Lois, the series devoted to Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch. For the fan, this means that Melissa Benoist's Supergirl and Tyler Hoechlin's Superman belong to the same television universe, even if the two shows ended up taking different directions.

If you want to place this version among all the others, our overview of every actor who has played Superman ranks the performers by generation, from film to television.

Crisis on Infinite Earths: the Paragon of Hope

The peak of the Benoist era is the crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, aired in five parts: three evenings from December 8 to 10, 2019, then a conclusion on January 14, 2020. Adapted from the famous comics event, it brings together all the network's heroes and brings back historic performers from the DC universe.

In this story, Kara is designated as the Paragon of Hope, one of the seven characters tasked with surviving the collapse of the multiverse so it can be rebuilt. The choice is consistent with everything the series had built: of all the Arrowverse heroes, Supergirl is the one whose optimism is the very definition.

The crossover also gives Melissa Benoist some of her strongest scenes, notably when Kara witnesses the destruction of her Earth and loses, for a second time, everything she had left. Our article on Crisis on Infinite Earths and the return of Brandon Routh's Superman details the event as a whole.

Lasting consequence: at the end of the crisis, Supergirl's Earth is merged with that of the other heroes. The last two seasons therefore take place in a world where Kara and her allies finally share the same reality.

After Supergirl: what she has become

The end of the series in November 2021 was not the end of a career, far from it. Melissa Benoist has since diversified her projects, deliberately stepping away from superheroes to avoid being locked into the character.

She can be seen notably in The Girls on the Bus, a 2024 series about political journalists following a presidential campaign — a reporter role that obviously makes fans smile, Kara Danvers having herself ended up a journalist in National City. She has also developed work as a producer.

On a personal level, she got engaged in February 2019 to Chris Wood, who played Mon-El in Supergirl, before marrying him in September of the same year. The couple is one of the few born on the set of a superhero series to have lasted beyond filming.

Finally, she has spoken publicly several times on subjects that go beyond fiction, which reinforced, among her audience, the idea that the heroine and the actress shared the same sense of commitment.

Her legacy facing the new Supergirl

With the film Supergirl scheduled for 2026 and the choice of Milly Alcock to play Kara Zor-El in the new DC universe, the question of comparison is inevitable. The two approaches are nonetheless very different.

Melissa Benoist's Kara is a television heroine: built over time, surrounded by a family, carried by the weekly repetition of small victories. The new version, announced as rougher and more damaged, answers a different brief, that of a single film that has to establish a character in two hours.

What Melissa Benoist leaves behind is first of all a proof: that a superheroine series can last six seasons on a major network, without cynicism and without giving up the character's optimism. That's far from trivial when you remember how skittish the studios were in 2015.

She also leaves a definition of Supergirl that many comics readers have come to adopt: a Kara warmer than her cousin, more impulsive too, and whose strength comes as much from her human ties as from her exposure to the yellow sun.

Conclusion

Melissa Benoist didn't just play Supergirl: she established a reading of the character, sunny and endearing, that held for six seasons and carried through the biggest crossover in superhero television. It's a long-haul performance, built episode after episode, and that's precisely why it leaves a lasting mark.

Her on-screen boss and mentor also has her own feature: read our profile of Calista Flockhart, the show's Cat Grant.

The new big-screen Supergirl won't erase her: she'll be compared to her. And to understand where the character they both embody comes from, our article on Kara Zor-El in the comics tells the complete story of the Last Daughter of Krypton.