Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam has just added another member to its nascent take on DC Comics’ Justice Society, with Deadline reporting that Aldis Hodge has signed on to play the film’s incarnation of Hawkman. Hodge—whose last big roles saw him co-star opposite Elisabeth Moss in The Invisible Man, and play football legend Jim Brown in Regina King’s One Night In Miami…—joins a cast that includes Johnson as Egyptian anti-hero Black Adam, and Noah Centineo as the super-strong, super-big Atom Smasher.
Given that Hodge is being listed as playing the character of “Carter Hall,” Black Adam is apparently going with the original version of the character’s backstory—which is probably for the best, given that comic book Hawk-people continuity is generally considered a total fucking mess, even by the very loose standards of the comic book storytelling business. (In brief: He’s either a reincarnated Egyptian prince using a magical flying belt, or an actual alien cop from a planet of hawk people, depending on which era of comics you’re reading. Oh, except sometimes, one of them is a reincarnation of the other, because reincarnation doesn’t care if you’re a bird person from space. But we digress.) The whole “Egyptologist who stumbles into his powers” thing also will presumably help tie the character into Adam’s backstory, since they both hail from roughly the same neck of the woods.
Black Adam—which will likely incorporate other characters from the Justice Society, a team of superhero elder statesmen who first formed in the 1940s—is expected to start filming next year. Johnson showed off some teaser art for the film earlier this year, at DC’s FanDome event.