While details about the upcoming Green Lantern series for HBO Max are still somewhat scarce, we did get some news today via an interview with Finn Wittrock over at EW.com.
Wittrock will be playing Alpha male Guy Gardner who is described as “an embodiment of 1980s hyper-patriotism who is somewhat likable” and his portion of the series is said to take place in the year 1984.
“This one did kind of fall from the sky,” he said to EW about the role, which sounds kind of like how someone would become a Green Lantern in that fictional world. “It’s really exciting for me. I’m considering myself a student of the comic book universe right now.”
Wittrock says that “people will be really, really pleasantly surprised” by the HBO Max series, and promises that the story will be “epic and sprawling.”
Those who know the comic books know that Guy Gardner is quite polarizing, but he has a “heart of gold.”
“He takes on a lot of this show. He’s a pretty big part of it,” Wittrock revealed. “I think it’s an interesting way in [to the story]. It’s not the conventional way in, but I think people might see a side of him they didn’t know was there.”
Filming for Green Lantern is expected to start either by the end of 2021 or early in 2022, with the first two episodes being directed by Lee Toland Krieger (Superman & Lois, Riverdale). And, yes, he’s seen the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie, but he feels this series will get to do even more.
“In some ways, it’s almost better. I think it offers a chance to reinvent the whole thing and you’re not going to have… I mean, no offense to the movie. It is what it is, but you’re not going to have people who are dying for the creation of that movie. [The show] can be its own new interpretation,” he said.
“There’s a lot of story there. I think maybe it was just too much to fit into a movie. We have the time and the space, thanks to HBO, to really explore a lot of it on a big scale. I think it’s going to be a different animal, to be honest,” he continued.
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