‘Green Lantern’ has found its star: Finn Wittrock to play Guy Gardner in HBO Max series

The new live-action Green Lantern Corps finally has its first member. TV Line reports that Finn Wittrock, best known to genre fans for projects like American Horror Story: Freak Show and Ratched, has joined the cast of the developing HBO Max series Green Lantern, marking the first major casting new on a project fans have been waiting a long time to see. 

Wittrock will play Guy Gardner, the brash, outspoken and often downright obnoxious Green Lantern of Earth who debuted in 1968 and has since become integral to both the Green Lantern Corps and other key DC Comics teams, most famously Justice League International. 

DC Comics

Green Lantern is co-written by DC TV legends Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, the minds behind hits like Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow. Seth Grahame-Smith, best known for projects like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and The LEGO Batman Movie, will serve as showrunner on the streaming series, which serves as the first major Green Lantern-based live-action project of Warner Bros. modern, DC Universe-building era.

Warner Bros. has been at work on some version of a Green Lantern project since the days of Batman v Superman, when the studio hoped to reshape the portrayal of the corps and its characters after the ill-fated 2011 film starring Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan. The project was originally set to be a film, but sat in development for years with no major movement before HBO Max came along and kickstarted Warners interest in a small-screen component to build alongside its big-screen universe. That has, so far, led to show's like Matt Reeves' upcoming The Batman spinoff focused on Gotham City police and James Gunn's The Suicide Squad spinoff focused on Peacemaker. 

Green Lantern was first announced as an HBO Max project in the fall of 2019, and in 2020 the streamer revealed that the series is expected to focus on a group of key Green Lanterns both classic and modern. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series will be a bit of a time-hopper, beginning in the 1940s with closested FBI Agent Alan Scott (the first Green Lantern in DC Comics) before moving to Gardner in the 1980s and then jumping forward to more modern characters, which were previously reported to be fellow Lanterns Jessica Cruz and Simon Baz. According to THR, we should expect casting news on the Alan Scott front very soon. 

So, after nearly a decade of waiting for a new Green Lantern project to take shape, we finally have at least one of the Emerald Knights in place, with more on the way.