The Walking Dead Actor Ryan Hurst Really Wants to Play the Sentry in the Marvel Universe

Ryan Hurst, the Sons of Anarchy veteran who plays the role of Beta on The Walking Dead, has his eye on one particular superhero role — and it’s not one of the dream roles every actor tends to bounce around. Instead, he wants to play Sentry, a character created by Marvel and originally presented as the “lost creation” of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The hero would go through a lot in the years that followed, with his basic premise often being boiled down to a Superman or Thor-level powerhouse who is unstable due to a villainous presence that can exert influence on him.

Actually created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee, and Rick Veitch, Sentry first appeared in 2000. The character is the product of a joint American and Canadian effort to recreate and supercharge the super-soldier serum that gave Steve Rogers his powers.

You can see Hurst’s post below.

By the description above, it may sound like he was the intended recipient of the serum and part of a military project. Not so much. Actually, Robert Reynolds was a meth addict, who broke into the laboratory of an unnamed professor and discovered the Golden Sentry Serum. After taking it, Reynolds gained “the power of a million exploding suns” in a moment that killed his partner and the lab’s guards. After that, he leaned on the professor to make more for him. 

In spite of this checkered past, and some initial acts that don’t feel especially heroic, early stories depicted The Sentry as an optimistic and socially accepted hero, in sharp contrast to most of Marvel’s flawed and tortured ones. This was likely partially inspired by the early mythology that Sentry was the first Lee/Kirby superhero, with the idea being that if he predated The Fantastic Four #1, he might be a hero more in the traditional DC vein. While his stories have changed radically over time, he has remained one of the most successful totally original characters (contrasted with successful derivative characters like Spider-Gwen) that Marvel has come up with since the ’80s.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, fans took it into their own hands, and now there’s fan art of Hurst as Sentry.

Would you be into seeing Ryan Hurst in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Regardless, are you up for some Sentry stories in live action? Let us know in the comments or hit up @russburlingame on Twitter for all things comics and film.