Actor Recalls Seeing His Model Mom in Friend’s ‘Playboy’ in Fifth Grade

Dean Cain was never embarrassed by his mother’s Playboy career.

The Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman star, 58, recalled a childhood friend finding the “one photoshoot” his mother did as a Playboy Bunny during a recent conversation with Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast.

Cain shared that his now-78-year-old mother, who was once crowned Miss Michigan International Speedway, did a “more discreet” photoshoot for Playboy in which she was “looking back over her shoulder with a see-through negligee on.”

It was that photo Cain’s childhood friend unexpectedly found when he invited the actor over to his house in fifth grade to look through his dad’s old Playboys. “He goes, ‘Look at this!’ He opens it up and he’s like, ‘Look at her, whatever, blah blah,’” he remembered. “And he flips the page and he goes, ‘Look at her ass!’ And I go, ‘That’s my mom.’”

Cain admitted he already knew about the photograph of his mother before seeing it in his friends’ Playboy. “My mom had that picture next to her bed and everything, you know, so I knew it was there,” he said. “I had seen my mom’s picture because it was next to the bed [in] her bedroom, but the kids hadn’t been up there, my friends hadn’t gone to my parents’ room.”

Asked how “embarrassed” he was at his friend’s discovery, Cain said he had no feelings of shame surrounding it at all. “Oh, no. Wasn’t even embarrassing. Didn’t even think twice about it,” he remembered. “I was like, ‘That’s my mom, dude.’ And he was like, ‘What?’”

Cain said that instead, the memory actually turned into a hilarious moment for both him and his friend. “We laughed for probably an hour,” he said. “We probably laughed so hard, I don’t think we spoke for 40 minutes.” He then shouted out his old pal, adding, “And Darren Perman, if you’re listening, you know it was you, buddy.”