As DC Universe continues to hunt around for the killer app—Doom Patrol? Stargirl? Harley Quinn?—that’ll help us all forget that it’s the house that “Fuck Batman” built, one of the weirder projects on the streaming service’s current production slate took another step toward existing today. Deadline reports that the James Wan-produced Swamp Thing series has just cast the two sides of its mossy, swamp criminal-battling coin, tapping the actors who’ll be playing Mr. Thing both before, and after, his big transformation.
Specifically, Andy Bean (who appeared on two seasons of Starz’s Power) has been cast as Dr. Alec Holland, while Derek Mears—a veteran stuntman who’s lent his hulking frame to such classic horror characters as Jason Voorhees and the Predator—will play Holland once he starts doing his swamp thing. (And yes, we’ve all read Alan Moore’s “The Anatomy Lesson,” but for now, press for the show says the two characters are one and the same.) The casting of Mears, whose work runs way more toward prosthetics and costumes than soliloquies, suggests that this version of Swamp Thing will be going for the strong, silent, home to a variety of endangered plant species type. That’s in line both with a description for the show, which centers on Crystal Reed as Abby Arcane, a young woman who stumbles into a Southern Gothic world of bayous, viruses, and, of course, marsh-based romantic opportunities, and the presence of pilot director Len Wiseman, whose Underworld movies never-shied away from a chance for a little magical inter-species romance.