Rainn Wilson and director James Gunn are said to share a close friendship, first collaborating on the 2010 dark comedy Super. Written and directed by Gunn, the film featured Wilson as an ordinary man who transforms into a costumed vigilante.
Their partnership carried on with a brief, uncredited cameo from Wilson’s character in the 2019 horror movie Brightburn, which Gunn produced, sparking speculation of a shared universe between the two films. More recently, Wilson sat down with Gunn for Interview Magazine to discuss his new role as co-head of DC Studios.
Could their friendship ever lead to Wilson securing a role in the DCU? Wilson appears to be hoping that's the case as he's reportedly pitched himself as the DCU's Patrick "Eel" O'Brian, aka Plastic Man.
"I've hinted to James several times, like, 'Hey man, you've got to do something with Plastic Man,'" Wilson told the crowd while attending Fan Expo Chicago as a special guest. "He's one of my favorite DC characters, and I loved him growing up."
He continued, "He had a wicked sense of humor. The Plastic Man comics were very, very funny. That would be a fun one to unearth. I would be a fan even if I wasn't in it. I would love to watch that... And play him."
Patrick "Eel" O’Brian began as a low-level criminal until a botched robbery left him shot and doused with a strange chemical substance. Instead of killing him, the accident granted him extraordinary powers, allowing him to stretch, contort, and transform his body into virtually any shape.
Abandoning his criminal past, he reinvented himself as Plastic Man, a quirky superhero who combines his elastic abilities with an offbeat sense of humor to battle villains. His powers make him remarkably adaptable, able to disguise himself, impersonate others, or even turn into objects like parachutes and vehicles.
In certain comic storylines, Batman has gone so far as to claim that Plastic Man, not Superman, is the Justice League’s most powerful member.
Interestingly, back in the early 2000s, James Gunn unsuccessfully pitched a Plastic Man movie to Warner Bros., with Matthew Lillard occupying the lead role while the two were collaborating on Scooby-Doo.
Around the period when studios were experimenting with female-led remakes and spin-offs of male-centered franchises, such as 2016’s Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 8, Warner Bros. reportedly enlisted Cat Vasko to draft a script for a gender-swapped Plastic Man film. However, that project ultimately never came to fruition.