Scott James Wells
Scott James Wells was an American actor and model born on July 4, 1961, in Dayton, Ohio. He grew up in Ohio and attended West Carrollton High School before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting and modeling. He appeared on TV shows such as Emergency! and Beauty and the Beast, and did modeling work for Calvin Klein and Coppertone. He also appeared in Gloria Estefan’s 1988 music video “Anything For You.”
In 1988 Wells was cast as Lex Luthor in the first season of Superboy, appearing in four episodes as a younger version of the villain. After the show’s ratings declined, Wells and co-star John Haymes Newton were replaced starting with Season 2; Sherman Howard took over the Lex Luthor role. The change in Luthor’s look was explained on screen as the character having scars and aging, with a new appearance.
After leaving Superboy in 1989, Wells appeared in The Taking of Beverly Hills (1991). He later left show business, with only a single acting credit as a stand-in in Indecent Behavior III (1995). In 1998 he moved from Los Angeles to attend a drug and alcohol recovery program in Sacramento, California, and later returned to Dayton. Wells died on October 28, 2015, in Dayton, at age 54.
In 2006, producer Ilya Salkind noted that Wells’s absence from the Season 1 DVD extras was because he was in rehab.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:33 (CET).