‘Watchmen’ Star Tim Blake Nelson Reveals His Mysterious Character

HBO’s Watchmen television series isn’t expected until sometime in 2019, but fans won’t have to wait until then to find out a little more about the series. Tim Blake Nelson has revealed who he will be playing in the series.

Nelson, perhaps best known for his role in O Brother, Where Art Thou as well as his recent work in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, recently told the Empire Film Podcast that he is playing Looking Glass, a character that doesn’t appear in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen comics.

“My character’s name is Looking Glass, and it’s a really interesting, intriguing character,” Nelson said. “I don’t really completely understand him, and that’s intentional. Damon Lindelof metes out facts about your character as you go along… So I’m learning as I go along with this guy is, and trying to… It’s almost like fresco painting. The clay is always wet.”

Looking Glass is described as “a good looking cop, the native Oklahoman isn’t simple as his rural accent makes him appear to be. A top interrogator and behavioral scientist, he may also be a bit of a sociopath.” And while Looking Glass isn’t from the comics, the “wet clay” approach to the character may come, in part, from Lindelof’s approach to the Moore and Gibbons source material. The series, reportedly largely set in Tulsa Oklahoma, takes place after the comics with Lindelof largely using the source material as something Nelson described as a history book of sorts.

“Damon Lindelof… is doing something that I think Alan Moore actually will appreciate, which is that he’s treating the Watchmen novel as a history book, and he’s imagining the world created by the Watchmen now,” Nelson said. “And he’s using that as a prism through which to examine a lot of issues currently on the surface of American culture and politics.”

Lindelof himself has previously said that the original series is his jumping off point that will remix the “sacred ground” the original story created.

“We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago,” Lindelof wrote in a social media post. “Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated no reproduced no rebooted.”

“They will, however, be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.”

Are you curious about Looking Glass? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Watchmen does not currently have a release date but is expected in 2019.