Comic-Con: Nathan Fillion surprises ‘Lanterns’ panel
Nathan Fillion jokes about his Comic-Con invite as he “surprises” the “Lanterns” panel.
“Lanterns” star Kyle Chandler wants to make a couple of things clear about why Green Lantern is better than your average superhero.
“One, we don’t need to wear capes. I’m tired of these caped crusaders. It’s just ridiculous,” says the “Friday Night Lights” alum, taking a playful dig at fellow superfriends Batman and Superman. “No. 2, we didn’t come from Krypton. We weren’t born with these [powers]. We’ve got one tool that was given to us, right or wrong, and with that tool, we perform the tasks that we need to.”
For a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps in DC Comics lore, that job is essential to being a space cop. However, the new DC drama “Lanterns” (premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max) offers a more grounded situation: Earth’s Green Lantern, Hal Jordan (Chandler), and trainee John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) travel to small-town Nebraska to investigate a murder scene that might have some alien involvement.
Green Lanterns are chosen for the gig by the Guardians of the Universe, and each have a power ring that, like an iPhone, they have to keep charged up. And instead of having inherent superpowers, they use the ring to manifest whatever the user can imagine, even allowing them to fly.
What’s special about them is “the idea that it could be anybody. It could be you. It could be anyone. You just have to be fearless,” says Nathan Fillion, who’s played the obnoxious Green Lantern Guy Gardner in last year’s “Superman” and the DC TV series “Peacemaker,” and also appears in “Lanterns.”
“You just have to have that thing that makes you special, that makes you worthy, the thing that we all want.”
Fillion voiced Hal Jordan in some DC animated films, and Ryan Reynolds played the character in the 2011 movie misfire “Green Lantern.” “Lanterns,” however, explores the Green Lantern Corps mythology for the first time in the rebooted DC universe – “True Detective” murder-mystery style.
Executive producer Tom King, a comic-book writer whose work inspired the recent “Supergirl” movie, saw a way to meld “emotional realism in an exaggerated universe” with “the 9 o’clock HBO show” a la “The Sopranos,” he says. “There just seemed to be utter potential there with them being space cops, with Hal Jordan being his man without fear and John Stewart being this man raised in a completely different way.”
Fellow “Lanterns” co-creator Damon Lindelof was admittedly more of a Marvel guy growing up. He learned about characters like Hal Jordan and the villain Sinestro through the old “Superfriends” cartoon, and “as I got older and spent way too much time smoking pot and watching cartoons,” was introduced to John Stewart through the animated “Justice League Unlimited.” But, “I fell in love with Hal and John once I started doing this show.”
Executive producer/co-creator Chris Mundy (“Ozark”) was fascinated by Green Lantern’s superpower being their imagination.
“Hal’s going to do something different than John using the ring for the same situation, Mundy says. “John’s an architect, so his stuff is going to be more mechanical. In something that’s so fantastical, that’s really relatable.”
That relatability means a lot for Pierre. “I feel as though the Green Lantern Corps is just full of rock stars,” he says. “You look at John, you look at Hal, you look at Guy and you know these folks. You live with them, or you go to college with them, or work with them, or they’re your neighbor.”
What he loves about John is his heart, as well as his desire to be great and “become the best version of himself,” Pierre says. “You add that with the ring, and you have a dangerous man there.”
Mundy wanted “inherent tension” but also “warmth and some humor at the same time” between Hal and John, which is why they enjoy a multigenerational buddy-cop dynamic with plenty of banter, frequent butting of heads, and the occasional begrudging respect.
Filming a car scene, Chandler, 60, remembers he and Pierre, 32, “jabbing with each other some, and we started playing our characters but in real life with each other. We were pressing each other’s buttons a little bit.
“I said, ‘Well, you know, that’s because I’m a wiser person. And as you get older, you learn these things. You’re young, you wouldn’t know.’ Then Aaron said something like, ‘Well, that’s because you’re old.’ And then I was like, oh, I felt that in real life. That hurt,” Chandler says with a laugh.
Because both are flawed, “imperfect” characters, Pierre adds, “that is what makes us root for them.”