Kyle Chandler was hesitant about doing a superhero series. Then he read the first script for Lanterns, DC’s new HBO drama, and saw himself on the page. Within a day, he had said yes.
“You’ve got an ageing-out superhero, and I’m kind of hitting my age right now. I know these things. I have these thoughts,” Chandler tells The National. “I’m 60 years old, 61 in September. I’ve got some girls who are now 30 and 24, and there’s just a part of my life that fit right into this character.”
Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King, the eight-part series streaming on OSN+ in the region and certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes at 90%, pairs Chandler’s Hal Jordan with Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart. Both are members of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force whose rings allow them to fly and create almost anything they can imagine.
Hal has been doing the job for years, while John, a former US Marine, has only recently been recruited. Their investigation into a murder in the American heartland brings them together just as the older man is beginning to consider how much longer he can continue.
But as familiar as the character felt to him deep down, the trappings of a superhero show overwhelmed Chandler when he finally had to perform the role for the first time.
“I was scared as hell at that read-through because I had no idea,” Chandler says. “I’d never read it out loud by myself with the idea of, ‘Oh, I’m performing now in front of these people.’”
To ground himself, Chandler zeroed in on the script’s humour. It was there that he found his voice – and his connection with Pierre, who remembers the same reading as the moment their partnership began.
“From that moment, I discovered Kyle and I shared the same philosophy when it came to dialogue and how to engage with it,” Pierre says. “We both enjoy improvisation. We both enjoy adding our own personal little something to it in any given moment.
“There are moments where you fall off the horse and get back on it. It’s a falling-forward process, and as long as you’re falling forwards, it’s all conducive to the project becoming the best version of itself.”
The room’s response encouraged them to keep taking risks – or, as Chandler puts it, to “fall even more forward”. The script was sturdy enough to take them.
“I love playing the comedy and humour of things. Whenever I can find a chance, no matter how slight, I have to put it in,” Chandler says. “This had the pathology of this character along with the humour in the writing. The writing allowed us to do so much, and the writers and creators expected us to fill those gaps because they had already filled out the most important parts of the relationship and where it was going.”
Chandler’s coach Eric Taylor spent Friday Night Lights carrying the expectations of his football team and family, while never quite achieving the certainty people needed from him. In Netflix's Bloodline, John Rayburn clung to the idea that he was the responsible brother even as his decisions began to expose the lie.
Hal has been trusted with decisions neither Taylor nor Rayburn ever faced. Chandler wondered what years of making them had left behind.
“I look at this guy as having a very dark pathology,” he says. “You could say his father died when he was young, and this and that. But he’s also making decisions over the course of his career: do I save these 100 people by letting these other people die? He’s doing the kinds of things firefighters and policemen do – and that we all do in our lives – that are really dark.
“He’s the older superhero. He’s been through the stuff. I think that’s also a superpower they have, because they have to overcome those things. They’re flawed characters who were then given, at some age, this tool to do things that are superhuman. It’s complicated and fun.”
John begins his training beside a man wearing the weight of those years, one no longer sure how much longer he can carry it. As Hal teaches him the job, the possibility that the younger man may one day replace him hangs over their partnership. Pierre found some of that friction waiting for them in the casting.
“Whoever made the decision to put a council estate boy from South London with a rural Texan, they need a promotion. They need a raise. They need all the things,” he says.
“Kyle and I have this unique dynamic where there are moments when we have completely opposing perspectives, and then others when you would think we’re twins. That spilt over beautifully into the dynamic of these characters.”
Chandler had a more immediate concern. Six months is a long time to spend with a stranger.
“You never know. He may do great work and be a great actor,” he says. “It sure was nice, once we started working together, to look across the table and say, ‘Oh, good. I’m working with a really nice person, a very professional person, a really good actor – and a friend.’
“That happened early, and then we were really able to make fun of each other.”
The wider DC universe rarely interrupts Hal and John’s arguments. Chandler refers to a scene with Kelly Macdonald, who plays local sheriff Kerry Kane.
“I’m walking with Kelly at one point, and she’s from Gotham. Then it’s just left alone,” he says. “Now you know that world is happening within this world, but they don’t go into detail. It’s a given. It’s baked into the cake. I really like that they did that gently, so we went back to the human aspect of it.”
Sure, this is a superhero show, with decades of comic-book lore compressed into a True Detective-like murder mystery. Most of the time, Chandler could forget the scale of it and play the man he had recognised on the page. Every so often, though, the superhero of it all would intrude with a practical question: wait – how do I fly?
“I had to figure out, do I want to tiptoe up and jump?” Chandler says. “How am I going to launch off the ground?”
Lanterns premieres tomorrow on OSN+ in the Middle East
