Courtesy of Eonline~
Few things are a sure bet in Hollywood, but if you appear in your big, buzzed-about TV pilot tied up like a scarecrow in only a pair of boxers with a big red S painted on your six-pack, you'll make E! Online's Sizzlin' Sixteen list. And so, Tom Welling, who plays a teenage Clark Kent, caught our attention when billboards for WB's Smallville sprouted up around our fair metropolis.

"I'm going to skip that," says a demure Welling on the phone from his adopted home in Vancouver, where he shoots 16 hours a day six days a week.

The billboards worked, as Smallville was a hit right out of the gate. "We have such quality and depth," says Welling, "so it's not a big surprise that we're received as well as we are. I get the show taped for me, and I love watching it. If I'm there every day and still be excited about watching it...that's something special."

When Smallville breaks for its four-month hiatus, Welling will take advantage of his heat. Pitch his agency, CAA, for any movie with a kid between 18 and 25, and they'll recommend...Tom Welling. "My marketability has improved," he says modestly. He doesn't seem concerned about teen roles weighing him down like a chunk of Kryptonite: "I really haven't put up any walls or barriers for any project."

And why should he worry? He could well be destiny's child. After he landed the part of Clark Kent, Welling's dad told him that when he was four and five, he wore a Superman costume for Halloween "and wouldn't have it any other way."

Flash-forward 20 years or so, and Welling's practicing his X-ray vision on high school lockers while the guy who plays Lex Luther, Michael Rosenbaum, is pleading with him to get off the phone so they can get lunch.

Now, about being tied up half-naked in a cornfield...Welling says there's nothing sexy about it. "It was 15 degrees, and I had on a pair of Alaskan work boots and had two heaters behind me. There wasn't much of that that night."
--Anderson Jones