Finn Wittrock has made a name for himself in the likes of American Horror Story and Ratched, but his biggest role to date will come in HBO Max's planned Green Lantern TV series as Guy Gardner. Seth Grahame-Smith (who once penned a draft of The Flash movie) is set to serve as showrunner, and the actor is confident "people will be really, really pleasantly surprised" by the DC Comics adaptation.
"It is really cool how sprawling a storyline it is," Wittrock continued. "It's pretty epic. It spans time and space and has something for everyone. It's not your average superhero story."
Alan Scott, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz, Sinestro, and Kilowog are all expected to appear in Green Lantern, but the actor insists that while Guy is a "polarising figure," he still has "a heart of gold." Wittrock adds, "He takes on a lot of this show. He's a pretty big part of it. I think it's an interesting way in [to the story]. It's not the conventional way in, but I think people might see a side of him they didn't know was there."
Perhaps the biggest challenge for Green Lantern will be escaping the shadow of the 2011 movie that kept the franchise on the shelf for over a decade. If this series fails to hit the mark, that could be it for the hero, and Wittrock is all too aware of the expectations placed on his shoulders.
"It definitely was something that was in my head. In some ways, it's almost better. I think it offers a chance to reinvent the whole thing and you're not going to have. I mean, no offense to the movie. It is what it is, but you're not going to have people who are dying for the creation of that movie. [The show] can be its own new interpretation."
"There's a lot of story there. I think maybe it was just too much to fit into a movie," he says of how the Green Lantern series will differ from the big screen version. "We have the time and the space, thanks to HBO, to really explore a lot of it on a big scale. I think it's going to be a different animal, to be honest."
Green Lantern should be worth keeping an eye on, and Guy Gardner is definitely a very different character to Hal Jordan. He is still expected to appear alongside John Stewart in that Green Lantern Corps movie, but it's been a long time since we got a solid update on Warner Bros.' plans for that feature.