Sebastian Stan, who is said to be circling a key role in next year’s sequel to The Batman — hello Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent? — was damn close to portraying another DC character 15 years ago: the Green Lantern. This was revealed during an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, when Stan recounted stepping into the audition room beside some serious heavyweight talent.
“I remember getting there, and it was like, me, Justin Timberlake, Jared Leto, Ryan Reynolds, and maybe one other person. And I’m looking at these guys, going, ‘I’m f*****. There’s no way this is happening for me.’ Looking back, I’m almost glad it didn’t because I don’t know if I could have handled that level of attention like some of those guys.”
In a blockbuster that still leaves cinephiles wincing, Ryan Reynolds ended up securing the role of Hal Jordan, the first-ever human to join the intergalactic police force Green Lantern Corps. The actor’s future wife, Blake Lively, appeared as Carol Ferris, while Mark Strong (as Thaal Sinestro), Peter Sarsgaard (Hector Hammond), Angela Bassett (Amanda Waller), Tim Robbins (Robert Hammond), Geoffrey Rush (Tomar-Re), Taika Waititi (Thomas Kalmaku), Michael Clarke Duncan (Kilowog), and Clancy Brown (Parallax) each added pedigree to the cast.
25%-rated on Rotten Tomatoes, Green Lantern is widely considered to be one of the worst superhero flicks of this century. The experience burned Reynolds so bad that he even told DC Studios’ co-boss James Gunn to “get the f*** out of here!” upon being approached to reprise the character.
‘Green Lantern’ Director Martin Campbell Knows Why His Movie Flopped
Ryan Reynolds in Green LanternWarner Bros.
While promoting his latest movie Cleaner just under a year ago, Green Lantern director Martin Campbell reflected on the infamous flop. Apparently, its failure was linked to his own indifference towards comic book adaptations. He told Variety:
“I’d never done one before. I think quite honestly, if you’re going to do a superhero movie, you have to be in that world a little bit, you know what I mean? You have to be excited by it. You have to have a background where you are part of that world, and you’ve been involved in that thing. And I wasn’t. I also felt that Parallax, our bad guy, was just a cloud with a face on it — literally, that’s all it was.”
Reynolds hasn’t been shy with his analysis of the situation, either. He once explained at the Wall Street Journal’s CMO Council Summit that his positioning within the industry at that time meant that he couldn’t speak up when witnessing inevitable mistakes on set.
“You know, that was a time in my life when I was ‘Yes, sir, no, sir. How high can I jump, sir?’ You sit there, and you go, ‘I have really strong thoughts and opinions on a creative matter,’ and someone else on another movie, I remember, made a creative decision, and ‘I thought, well, that’s a nail in a coffin that I alone will lie in.’
“They don’t say, ‘This producer’s movie flopped,’ or ‘This director’s [movie flopped].’ That’s me. So if I’m going to be on that headline, I’d like to be the architect of my own demise — or success.”
- Release Date
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June 17, 2011
- Runtime
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114 minutes
- Director
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Martin Campbell
- Writers
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Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg, Michael Green, Greg Berlanti