With the announcement this week that Constantine is in development at NBC (based on DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer comics), there was an immediate burst of conversation on the Web around who, exactly, should play the character.After all, it’s not as though the casting for the feature film version was exactly what people always wanted and expected. The acerbic, blond Brit was replaced by a quiet California boy with black hair and a penchant for air guitar. Had it worked, that would have been Heath Ledger-level inspired casting…but since the film was widely panned and a financial disappointment, a lot of the blame fell back on star Keanu Reeves.So–who would we cast in the next iteration of Constantine? We’ve got a few ideas below, but first a few ground rules, in the hopes of coming up with some candidates who might actually end up in the job:
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- No A-listers. The odds of Benedict Cumberbatch or Tom Hiddleston (or even Idris Elba) electing to leave their blockbuster movie careers behind to be the lead in a network TV series that could very well be cancelled after a year is pretty much zero, and so a list that just rattled off “famous Britons I know” would be about as useful going to a random page on IMDb and saying, “That guy!”
- Nobody who has another TV series right now. We’d love to put Jonny Lee Miller on here, but so long as Elementary is going strong at CBS, he’s every bit as impossible to lure away as Tom Hiddleston.
James MarstersSpike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer has so much in common with John Constantine that it’s going to be hard to avoid people drawing comparisons from Marsters’s most popular character and a guy who will be actively cast in Hollywood over the next few months.Does that give Marsters the inside track? It’s hard to say; he could very well not want to be pigeonholed into that kind of role for the rest of his life, but as a lot of people said when the possibility of Christian Bale’s Batman returning came up–just because you’re going to get turned down doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t ask.The bigger problem, though–at least arguably–is his age. Marsters is 51, and while he looks pretty good for that age, sooner or later the smarmy young turk thing isn’t going to look good on him. If they hope for the series to have a long life, and/or to tie into the prospective Dark Universe movie (which, by extension, would potentially put him onscreen with Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill), they’ll probably want a younger Constantine.
