Tyler Hoechlin
Tyler Hoechlin is an actor, born 1987.
His first big job is still his best-reviewed one. As Michael Sullivan Jr. in Road to Perdition he plays a boy on the run with his father, watching Tom Hanks far more than he talks to him, and it earned him a Critics' Choice nomination for Best Young Performer. Very little of the two decades since has looked like the career that credit seemed to promise. He went to television instead, playing Martin Brewer on 7th Heaven from 2003 to 2007, and then found the role that built him an actual fanbase: Derek Hale, the older werewolf with the permanent scowl, across Teen Wolf and its later film.
What he is good at is bulk without menace. Hoechlin is a big, physically credible actor whose instinct in a scene is to lower the temperature rather than raise it, which is why he works as Superman and not as a heavy. He first played Clark Kent in Supergirl, then carried the part through Superman & Lois from 2021 to 2024, where the show's insistence on treating Clark as an exhausted parent rather than a demigod suits him far better than the cape does.
The comedies are where the range shows up. Richard Linklater cast him in Everybody Wants Some!! as the team's insufferable senior, and he is genuinely funny in it. Palm Springs uses him for a small, precisely dumb part. Between those sit the paycheque jobs, Fifty Shades Freed and Can You Keep a Secret? among them. He also voices Sephiroth in the Final Fantasy VII Remake games, which is a second career the film credits do not show.
Movies (14)
TV (5)
Where to start with Tyler Hoechlin
Watch Road to Perdition first, both because it is the best film he has ever been in and because it sets a baseline: a kid carrying the film's point of view while the adults around him do the talking. Then take Teen Wolf, which is the fandom entry point and a genuinely good use of him, since Derek is written as the show's grudge and Hoechlin plays grudges well.
For the current version, Superman & Lois is the one to commit to. It is a domestic drama with a cape attached and the warmest performance in his catalogue. If that is too much television, Everybody Wants Some!! gets you the comic side in under two hours, and Palm Springs shows how little he needs to do to land a joke. Teen Wolf: The Movie is for completists. Fifty Shades Freed is for nobody.