Watchmen Star Jovan Adepo Addresses Possiblity of Hooded Justice Prequel (Exclusive)
After HBO released Damon Lindelof's Watchmen limited series in 2019, the show went on to earn 26 Emmy nominations, including wins for both Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as well as the award for Outstanding Limited Series. The show also earned a nomination for Jovan Adepo. The actor was up for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series for his role as young Will Reeves in flashbacks. During the show, it was revealed that Will was actually Hooded Justice, the most mysterious member of the Minutemen. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with Adepo about his new movie, Babylon, and we brought up the idea of a prequel series about Will.
"You know, I've heard people request that a few times," Adepo said of the idea. "I don't know if Damon would ever do that, but it's fun that people are excited about that character and he's one of my favorites." During the interview, we brought up the fact that Jean Smart is also in both Watchmen and Babylon, but Adepo didn't get the chance to share the screen with her in either project.
"It did, and that's our little inside joke," Adepo said when asked if the Watchmen connection came up with Smart. "It's like, 'I'm never too far from you. It's like whenever you think you've gotten away from me, I'm right here.'"
How Did Unmasking Hooded Justice Come About in Watchmen?
In the Watchmen episode, "This Extraordinary Being," Regina King's Angela Abar goes through the memories of her grandfather, and it's revealed that he was Hooded Justice. This was the first time the character's identity had ever been revealed until now. While chatting with ComicBook.com in 2020, Lindelof shared how the episode came together in such a cohesive way with all of its technical moving parts.
"I'll just say I'm a big fan of the single episode of television. I mean, I love serialized stories, but I also love that this is one of the things about the form of TV that it can do, which is to just give people a solid one-hour long experience that feels like it has a beginning, middle and end inside of the context of sort of a larger story. That's why I love doing TV; every once in a while you get to do that," Lindelof explained. "We knew that sort of the pivotal episode in this entire season was going to be the one where we revealed Hooded Justice's origin because it sort of unlocks everything that the season was about. Obviously, it correlates and connects to Angela in a very personal way. I think that once we sort of figured out the nostalgia pills, we figured out the device, the mechanism on a storytelling level to literally give the granddaughter the experience of the grandfather in this kind of Quantum Leap-y way, everything started to kind of fall into place."
He added, "It was a very difficult story to break for all of us in the writer's room. Cord [Jefferson] and I, for us to write it the real challenge was just cramming it all in there without it feeling like there was never an opportunity to breathe, so we wanted to create quiet moments as well. But I think that as proud as we are of the script and the story, I think all the credit just has to go with the incredible operation in Atlanta and Stephen Williams, who directed the episode. [He] just kind of immediately had a vision, a very envelope-pushing vision for how he was going to execute it. Along with Greg Middleton, who was the director of photography and Chris Cuevas, who was actually the cameraman who was in there doing every scene in kind of like one take, not to mention the incredible actors. I mean, Jovan Adepo doesn't get enough credit for the work that he did as well."
You can see Jovan Adepo in Babylon in theaters on December 23rd.