{"id":288573,"date":"2026-07-06T21:55:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T21:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/288573\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T21:55:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T21:55:43","slug":"watchmens-yahya-abdul-mateen-ii-was-amused-by-the-way-viewers-reacted-to-a-black-doctor-manhattan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/288573\/","title":{"rendered":"Watchmen\u2019s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II was amused by the way viewers reacted to a black Doctor Manhattan"},"content":{"rendered":"

When HBO\u2019s Watchmen<\/a> premiered in 2019, there was some discourse surrounding the casting of Doctor Manhattan. In Alan Moore\u2019s original comic<\/a>, the character is a white scientist who turns into a blue cosmic being. The HBO series cast Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a black actor, in the role.<\/p>\n

\u201cI played Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen, and Doctor Manhattan was blue,\u201d Yahya Abdul-Mateen II says during a recent THR Comedy Actor Roundtable<\/a>. \u201cHe\u2019s like a god. It was a conversation that I\u2019m black and I played Doctor Manhattan, because, in terms of the [comic book] canon, Doctor Manhattan wasn\u2019t blue, he was white.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abdul-Mateen continued, \u201cThere are pictures of me as Doctor Manhattan with like a chain, and like a dashiki, and like a Kofi, and things like that, and red laser eyes. I don\u2019t know what the red laser eyes are really all about, but I find the humor in it. It\u2019s like, ‘If we\u2019re going to make them black, let\u2019s make them blackety black.’ It makes me laugh though.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be clear, the series has Doctor Manhattan adopt the human identity of Cal Abar, who is black. Due to Doctor Manhattan\u2019s cosmic powers, he could look like any human being of any race. In the original Watchmen comic he is able to see through time and instantly vaporize humans. People had no trouble buying that, so why is it so hard to buy a black actor playing him?<\/p>\n

The HBO series Watchmen is streaming on HBO Max.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When HBO\u2019s Watchmen premiered in 2019, there was some discourse surrounding the casting of Doctor Manhattan. In Alan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[107219,6131,49430,75,84,83,9,24,63,110327,110326],"class_list":["post-288573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-film-tv","tag-hbo","tag-hbo-max","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-watchmen","tag-yahya-abdul-mateen-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}