With several false starts in the past, Green Lantern’s history on screen has been a fraught one — but all of that might well change with HBO Max’s new series, expanding on the existence of the Lantern Corps beyond the iconic Hal Jordan. American Horror Story star Finn Wittrock teased the series in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, calling the upcoming project “not your average superhero story.”
Wittrock, who’s been cast as Guy Gardner, one of a number of new Lanterns in the series, describes the new series as something that “fell from the sky” for him, after circling a number of superhero projects in the past but never being able to commit. The new series, from showrunner Seth-Grahame-Smith, promises to expand far beyond the missteps we’ve seen filmmakers take when attempting to bring Green Lantern to screen.
"It is really cool how sprawling a storyline it is," Wittrock said. "It's pretty epic. It spans time and space and has something for everyone. It's not your average superhero story." But that doesn’t mean he’s ignoring those who came before him. According to Wittrock, he’s knee-deep in Lantern research, a “student of the comic book universe” examining any kind of source material he can get his hands on — including the infamously poor 2011 film starring Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan.
"It definitely was something that was in my head," he said of the film. "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."
With the threat of having to live up to expectations eliminated, Wittrock is free to play Gardner however he pleases. Described by HBO as “an embodiment of 1980s hyper-patriotism”, Gardner might seem fairly shallow on the surface, but Wittrock thinks he might be able to bring something more: “He takes on a lot of this show. He's a pretty big part of it. 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."
Wittrock is on schedule to start filming the series — executive produced by Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim — sometime at the end of this year or the beginning of 2022. No release date has been announced yet for the series.