Legends of Tomorrow’s Matt Ryan Looks Forward To Watching The Next Constantine

Since 2014, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow star Matt Ryan has been the face of John Constantine, the “nasty piece of work” who first appeared in NBC’s Constantine before joining the Arrowverse with appearances on Arrow and Legends. With the end of the current season of Legends of Tomorrow on Sunday, Ryan will leave the character behind, taking on a new role following the character’s apparent death in last week’s episode. So what’s next for Ryan? Well, he’s looking forward to being able to go back to viewing John Constantine the way he did prior to 2014: as a hardcore fan.

Ryan has never been shy about his love for Constantine. He was a driving force behind getting certain elements of John’s backstory into Legends, and has frequently said that while he loves working on Legends, he tends to be protective of John, since his usual tone doesn’t fit all that well with the zany, time-traveling antics of the Legends. Now, he gets to go back to being a fan, and to enjoy whatever the next take on Constantine is, without feeling any responsibility for any potential divergence from the surce material.

“I was always working within a certain framework with John, or trying to. Legends is a really fun, wacky show, and now I don’t have to look after John so much,” Ryan told ComicBook. “So I have a lease on life there creatively, as an actor with this new character, that maybe I didn’t have with John. It was a different challenge, obviously. And as a fan, I’m so excited to see where he’s going to go now. And I can actually get excited about that, whether it’s on TV, or whether it’s in a movie, or Keanu’s playing him, or what have you. I’m just like, ‘Okay, what’s John doing?’ And I’m his biggest fan. So that is really exciting to me. Really exciting.”

There are plenty of rumors to choose from; for a while, word was Warner Bros. wanted to do a sequel to Keanu Reeves’s 2005 Constantine movie, but other reports indicate that the character will be a part of JJ Abrams’s planned Justice League Dark universe, potentially played by a person of color. Meanwhile, the Audible and Netflix versions of The Sandman both have the Constantine family represented in different ways.

The season finale of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow will air on Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.