Here's one of the major issues you guys are dancing around but not quite nailing.
The iconography of a known, name actor CAN and usually WILL compete with the iconography of a known commodity in the movie. The examples of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones doesn't work--because Indiana Jones wasn't already an Icon. yes, Ford was already a star with his own filmic personality, but Indiana Jones couldn't counter that with it's own lore and history. It was, for all intents and purposes, a new character.
The problem with hiring a name actor isn't a lack of confidence in their ability to sell the role, it's the potential clash between the history of the actor in the audiences mind battling the history of the character. often the two cannot occupy the same space without the performance suffering, which is the last thing a director wants. Either you watch it and are sucked in by the actor, or you watch it and you're sucked in by the character when it comes to characters like Superman.
Picking a name actor with a storied history and lots of hits under his belt INVITES the kind of personality clash between actor and character that would deaden an audience, no matter how good they are at their craft. Anthony Hopkins was respected in the acting field, but not necessarily all that well known by the public--and Hannibal Lecter wasn't that well known, either. Combined, it was a great match. The divide between the two became utterly transparent.
A good example of the opposite of this was 89's Joker. Jack Nicholson didn't really play the Joker. He played "unhinged Jack Nicholson" and people love "unhinged Jack Nicholson" in white face paint, so there you go. But it wasn't really the joker, it was Jack. It didn't help that his characters name was also JACK. in that case, the character worked because the actor's iconography utterly ABSORBED the characters.
that's something you want to avoid with Superman. Which is why going with an unknown was a good choice. I'm not saying you couldn't have had a name actor in there, but it would have, believe it or not, made the feasibility of the character harder to pull off, because then audiences have to reconcile the actor against the character--something you don't have to do when you're not familiar with the actor at all. I agree a good actor can almost FORCE you to empathize with the character they're playing--but it's easier when there's not a huge amount of iconography behind the character they're playing. Not HISTORY--Iconography.
Matt's argument is sorta specious mostly because he keeps saying that Singer wouldn't test ACTORS, implying that only non-actors got the shot. unknowns are still ACTORS. Singer didn't test STARS, much less SUPERSTARS. But he tested actors. Just because you don't know who they are doesn't mean they don't work at their craft.
