Finn Wittrock to play the asshole Green Lantern for HBO Max
When you’re picking out Green Lanterns, they come in a couple of different flavors. There’s the aliens, obviously—a lot of aliens, as DC Comics’ resident corps of space cops employs everyone from big burly pigmen, to fascists from the Generic Bad Guy Mustache Planet, to fan-favorite rodent Ch’p the space squirrel. But when it comes to the Lanterns from Earth, you’ve got four basic choices: Original flavor Hal Jordan, an Air Force test pilot whose hobbies include being a massive himbo and occasionally trying to eradicate all life in the galaxy; John Stewart, a former sniper/architect much beloved for his role in the old Justice League cartoon; Kyle Rayner, a cartoonist chosen to wear the Power Ring because he bumped into the wrong weird little blue dude in an alley; and, finally, Guy Gardner. Guy’s had a couple of different roles in the Green Lantern Corps over the decades, but his basic character trait has remained basically the same: He’s the Asshole Green Lantern.
Actually, make that “The Asshole Green Lantern Played by American Horror Story’s Finn Wittrock,” as Variety reports that the Ryan Murphy regular has signed on for HBO Max’s new Green Lantern series, becoming the first star to join the live-action show. The series is apparently set to cover a pretty wide span of Green Lantern history—including Alan Scott, a closeted FBI agent who we left out of the above list of Green Lanterns because he’s not a member of the Green Lantern Corps, he just found a magical lantern that happened to be green—as it stretches across multiple decades of storytelling. Wittrock’s Guy will presumably stand in for the ’80s and ’90s, when Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis helped solidify Gardner as a hyper-masculine doofus whose most famous fight was that time he got laid out by Batman in a single punch after a largely meaningless pissing match.
Green Lantern is being written and produced under the auspices of TV superhero mega-producer Greg Berlanti, although there’s no indication yet that the series will share any continuity with Berlanti’s Arrow-related multiverse of shows when its first, 10-episode season airs on HBO Max.