Lanterns: Kyle Chandler to Star as Hal Jordan in HBO's Green Lantern Series

DC Studios and HBO's Green Lantern TV series finds its lead in the Friday Night Lights star.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Kyle Chandler is going from Friday Night Lights to Green Lantern's light. The Friday Night Lights actor, who won an Emmy for his role as high school football coach Eric Taylor on the sports drama, has been chosen to wear the ring as the Green Lantern Hal Jordan in DC and HBO's Lanterns. According to The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the news, the live-action series is currently casting and in the middle of hiring directors ahead of a planned January 2025 shooting start in Atlanta.

News of Chandler's casting comes after Avengers and Dune star Josh Brolin reportedly passed on the role as the test pilot turned space cop in the True Detective-type mystery series produced by James Gunn (Superman) and Peter Safran (Aquaman) for DC Studios. 

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The live-action Green Lantern series received the green light in June and is from showrunner Chris Mundy (Netflix's Ozark), who serves as executive producer and co-writer with Damon Lindelof (HBO's Watchmen and The Leftovers) and Eisner Award-winning comic book writer Tom King (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow).

Lanterns is "a terrestrial-based mystery that leads into the overall story that we're telling throughout the different movies and television shows," DC Studios co-chairman and CEO Gunn said when announcing the series early last year. "We find this ancient horror on Earth, and these guys are basically supercops on 'Precinct Earth.'" As the Green Lanterns of Sector 2814, Jordan and his protégé, fellow power ring-wielding human John Stewart, are tasked by the Green Lantern Corps with investigating a mysterious threat that could cross over with the Gunn-directed Superman and the upcoming feature films Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and Swamp Thing.

A revamped version of the since-scrapped Green Lanterns TV series from prolific Arrowverse producer Greg Berlanti that was in the works at Max, Lanterns is inspired in part by the "Sinestro's Law" arc started in the 2016 Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps: Rebirth one-shot and Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps issues #1-7, which saw the tyrannical Sinestro and his Yellow Lanterns impose their rule over the universe.

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"John Stewart and Hal Jordan are two of DC's most compelling characters, and Lanterns brings them to life in an original detective story that is a foundational part of the unified DCU we're launching next summer with Superman," Gunn and Safran said at the time of the series announcement. The new DC Universe kicks off in December with the Max original animated series Creature Commandos, created and written by Gunn, before officially launching with Gunn's Superman movie in July 2025.

Along with his five-season role as Coach Taylor on Friday Night Lights, Chandler's television credits include the ABC period drama Homefront, Early Edition, and Bloodline, and episodes of Grey's Anatomy, Catch-22, and the Showtime anthology Super Pumped. Chandler portrayed astronaut Deke Slayton in the 2018 film First Man, and has appeared in such films as Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Kong, and the Oscar-winning dramas Argo and Zero Dark Thirty.

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