‘Green Lantern’ Scriptwriter Wants ‘American Gods’ Actor As John Stewart

Screenwriter Michael Green — who helped pen 2011’s Green Lantern and this year’s noirish Logan […]

November 27, 2017, 3:51pm

Screenwriter Michael Green — who helped pen 2011’s Green Lantern and this year’s noirish Logan — has thrown American Gods actor Ricky Whittle‘s name into the ring to play John Stewart, should the architect-turned-cosmic-cop ever make the jump to the big screen.

“I’ll probably get angry texts if I don’t say what’s in my heart which is that Ricky Whittle would make a fantastic John Stewart,” Green answered when asked by Yahoo which actor he’d like to see play the next Green Lantern.

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Whittle stars as Shadow Moon in American Gods, an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel, where Green serves as writer and executive producer. Green, who shared a Green Lantern screenplay credit with Greg Berlanti and writers Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg, said he’d be open to another go at the Green Lantern mythos despite the critical and financial failure of the 2011 adaptation.

“I feel like my experience on Green Lantern is very much unfinished and there are stories to tell there,” Green said. “That was not a film that turned out the way we’d hoped going in and I think there is an appetite for a better version of that.”

The concept of Green Lanterns were introduced to the DCEU — the shared cinematic universe home to Ben Affleck’s Batman, Henry Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman — in Justice League, with the brief inclusion of a Lantern during a flashback taking place thousands of years in the past.

“I think anything is possible, there are characters I love and I’d love to spend more time with,” Green said when asked if studio Warner Bros. would bring him on board for the DCEU, of which the first Green Lantern does not belong to.

“I don’t have any immediate plans for it now. I actually quite like all of the producers and executives involved in the DC films and at Warner Bros, some that I’ve known for a long time and some that I haven’t worked with for a long time and would be happy to again. Anything is possible but nothing is in the works.”

“I will say that my partners on Green Lantern, Gregg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, spent a lot of time talking about all the potential for subsequent Green Lantern films and I still love every idea that we discussed I don’t think they will ever come to fruition, not as we imagined them I don’t think,” Green continued. “If there’s a Green Lantern Corps to be done it will be all new fresh thinking.”

Warner Bros. officially announced a Green Lantern Corps movie during San Diego Comic Con 2017, tentatively set for summer 2020. The movie will presumably unite longtime Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart with other Corps members, who use rings fueled by willpower to battle injustice throughout the cosmos.