Watchmen: Titus Welliver Breaks Down Similarities in Rorschach and Bosch

Watchmen: Chapter 1 is now available on Digital.

By Jenna Anderson

DC's Watchmen has made its way into a new medium, with the first installment in a two-part animated movie making its debut on multiple platforms this month. The iconic comic storyline is brought to life with the help of an all-star ensemble cast, including Titus Welliver, who voices the shady private eye Rorschach. Welliver is no stranger to embodying hard-boiled detectives, having starred on the Bosch television franchise for the past decade. While speaking to ComicBook about his involvement with Watchmen: Chapter 1, Welliver made the connection between his onscreen portrayals of both Rorschach and Bosch's Harry Bosch.

"I think the similarity is that Rorschach is relentless in the same way that Harry Bosch is," Welliver explained in our interview, which you can check out above. "I mean, there's a kind of obsessive nature to the character. Even his attire is a throwback to the gumshoes — the fedora and the raincoat and all that. And Harry Bosch obviously is not as dark as Rorschach, but there's a weird similarity coming from a really bad and traumatic childhood. There are some similarities there. That's what made it kind of fun, was doing that. I've always said, I don't know why somebody doesn't do an animated series of Bosch. It would be really cool if they could pull that off. But I'd be a purist, man. I'd say, 'Well, it's gotta be cell animation.'"

What Is the Watchmen Animated Movie About?

In Watchmen: Chapter 1, in an alternate world history set in 1985, the murder of a government sponsored superhero draws his outlawed colleagues out of retirement and into a mystery that threatens to upend their personal lives and the world itself.

The cast of the Watchmen animated movie includes Titus Welliver as Rorschach, Matthew Rhys as Nite Owl, Katee Sackhoff as Silk Spectre, Michael Cerveris as Doctor Manhattan, and Troy Baker as Ozymandias.

Will Bosch: Legacy Return for Season 3?

In the same interview with ComicBook, Welliver provided a long-awaited update on the latest chapter of the Bosch saga, the forthcoming third season of Bosch: Legacy. 

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"We don't have a date yet. I have to imagine that it will come sometime in 2025, hopefully early in 2025. They're shooting the spinoff Ballard with Maggie Q and we introduced her character, Renee Ballard, in our tenth episode of Bosch: Legacy in this season three that's yet to come out so I imagine they'd want to kind of try to release those within some proximity of each other," Welliver said. "I'm actually shooting this week on the first episode. I'm contracted to do three episodes for this first season of Ballard so, yeah, I hope we get some sense of a release date, but that would be my suspicion. It would be somewhere around there, fingers crossed. But all I can say in advance is that our producers every year just seem to raise the bar on themselves and so I'm excited for this third season to come out because I think it's truly one of the best and I mean, including Bosch, in the ten years that I've been doing this. It's a really, really substantive season for us."

Watchmen: Chapter 1 is available exclusively on Digital as August 13, followed by an arrival on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on August 27. Watchmen: Chapter 2 is set to debut later in 2024.

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