Lanterns isn’t the kind of show Garret Dillahunt is used to making.
Having made a name for himself on Deadwood and Fear the Walking Dead, Dillahunt jokes that his taste typically leads him toward projects with “small, loyal, rabid fan bases.” Emphasis on the small. Lanterns is operating on a different scale.
The DC Studios series drew 9.3 million global viewers across HBO and HBO Max in its first three days, making it the biggest DC Studios series premiere on the streamer to date and one of HBO Max’s top five series debuts ever.
“This is the kind of project that has a massive amount of eyeballs on it,” Dillahunt tells Yahoo. “There’s a lot of expectation. There’s a lot of hope.”
Lanterns puts a grounded, detective-story spin on DC’s Green Lantern mythology. Aaron Pierre stars as new recruit John Stewart alongside Kyle Chandler’s veteran Hal Jordan as the pair investigates a murder in the heartland. It’s a case that leads them directly into the orbit of Dillahunt’s William Macon.
Macon is a wealthy and charismatic modern-day cowboy who seems very sure he knows what’s best for the world. He’s also exactly the kind of character Dillahunt has spent a career making viewers dubious of.
And four episodes into Lanterns, as of tonight, there are still plenty of reasons to be suspicious, especially after Dillahunt has hinted that Macon could be a front for a character familiar to DC fans. But Dillahunt isn’t clearing things up now.
He knows more than he’s willing to say
During our interview, despite teasing that Sunday’s episode is more revealing, he repeatedly stops himself from saying too much about Macon, in part because whatever viewers learn this week isn’t the end of the story.
“The whole NDA conversation has me double-thinking everything I say,” he says, “because there’s still more.”
The secrecy surrounding Lanterns is no joke. Dillahunt says it’s similar to what we’ve heard about actors entering the Marvel universe, where protecting twists and character reveals has become part of the job.
“It’s strict, and I don’t want to blow it anyway,” he says.
Dillahunt is firmly in the anti-spoiler camp.
“I don’t know why people want to know before it happens. I don’t know why they want to spoil it for themselves,” he says. “People are rabid to do that. I think they want to be the first. They want to say, ‘I knew this before anyone else,’ or something.”
His advice is much simpler: “Just wait, just see, just watch, listen.”
A massive production with an unexpectedly ‘joyful’ set
The scale of the production was unfamiliar territory for Dillahunt, who says he often gravitates toward smaller, independent projects. He remembers arriving on the Lanterns set and immediately realizing this was something different.
“There’s 150 extras. There’s all the vans and all the trucks and all the equipment, the horses,” he smiles. “It was just like, ‘Wow, this must be nice to have this kind of money to do stuff with.'”
For all that machinery, though, Dillahunt remembers the atmosphere as cheerful.
He reunited with Kelly Macdonald, whom he hadn’t worked with since No Country for Old Men, and already knew Jason Ritter from their theater days in New York.
“I don’t know if it was just we all were dying to get back to work after the [SAG-AFTRA] strike and all that stuff, to do something great and big,” he says, “but everyone was in a really good mood and very joyful making this thing.”
Lanterns also brought Dillahunt and Chandler together for the first time. Despite their decades in the business, the two had somehow never worked together.
“He seemed like my kind of dude,” Dillahunt says of Chandler. “We hit it off. I mean, I feel like we’ve known each other for 30 years.”
Apparently, they hit it off well enough to take the friendship beyond the Lanterns set.
“We’re about to go take a motorcycle trip together,” Dillahunt says.
He is equally effusive about Chandler and Pierre as scene partners, calling them “the best co-leads of a show I think I’ve ever been on.”
“They set a real tone,” he says. “Just super welcoming.”
Why he trusts James Gunn with the DC universe
Dillahunt also came to Lanterns with his own expectations: He’s a comic book fan himself.
“These characters mean a lot to a lot of people,” he says. “I collect comic books, so I understand. They’re very formative and important to us as young people growing up.”
Dillahunt collected both Marvel and DC comics, at one point filling 15 long boxes with issues that were carefully bagged and boarded. Among the comics he remembers gravitating toward were Green Lantern/Green Arrow.
They’re loving to a point. But don’t you mess with my canon.
So he doesn’t bristle at fans who have very specific ideas about how these characters should look, act or fit into DC lore. After spending years playing John Dorie on Fear the Walking Dead, he’s already experienced what happens when an actor steps into a world with fiercely protective fans.
The two fandoms, he says, aren’t all that different: “They have a lot invested in the source material. They’ve got a lot invested in these characters, and they hope it matches the way they imagined it — the thing that got them hooked.”
Walking Dead fans were “very diehard, very loving,” he says. His experience with DC fans has been similar … with one qualification.
“They’re loving to a point,” Dillahunt says. “‘But don’t you mess with my canon.'”
He laughs.
“And I respect that. I respect that.”
Dillahunt believes James Gunn does, too.
The actor didn’t spend much time with the DC Studios co-chief during production — Gunn, he points out, “has his hand over a whole lot of projects” — but Dillahunt was struck by the enthusiasm Gunn still brings to the superhero universe he’s been tasked with building.
“He still seems like a kid in a candy store,” Dillahunt says. “He seems like one of the crowd that we would have gone to the comic shop together [with]. … He just seems like he’s having a blast.”
That matters to Dillahunt because, as someone who grew up caring about these characters himself, he believes the DCU needs someone at the top who isn’t simply managing a franchise.
“He seems like he cares,” Dillahunt says. “And he’s got a plan, and I’m in favor of it.”
Deadwood didn’t just change his career — it set the standard
Of course, all the planning in the world doesn’t make Dillahunt any more willing to explain exactly where William Macon fits. Maybe audiences shouldn’t expect him to.
When I tell Dillahunt I’ve reached the point where I know better than to trust a character he’s playing, he laughs.
“Well, that’s good,” he says. “A lot of people think I just play bad guys all the time. But if you count it up, it’s about half and half. And the good guys I played are really good.”
It’s not necessarily villains that attract him anyway. It’s ambiguity.
“I like stories that aren’t necessarily about what they appear [to be],” he says. He likes playing characters “who are hiding something” — people who don’t feel compelled to “blurt out everything that’s in their head.”
Perhaps that’s another reason Dillahunt looks so at home playing Lanterns’ modern-day cowboy. Long before William Macon, there was Deadwood. Dillahunt calls the acclaimed HBO Western, on which he memorably played multiple characters, “one of the highlights of my whole career — or life.”
“That job gave me a career,” he says.
I’ll just say: Stay in and be patient. There’s great things coming.
He later reunited with Timothy Olyphant on Justified, where the two joked about the standard Deadwood creator David Milch had set for everything that came afterward.
“David kind of ruined everything for us because we’re always trying to make it into Deadwood,” Dillahunt says.
Dillahunt has now seen seven of Lanterns’ eight episodes, but the secrecy hasn’t ended for him either: He still hasn’t seen the finale. So when asked to tease where this increasingly strange mystery is going, he’s careful one last time.
“I think the fans are in,” he says. “I’ll just say: Stay in and be patient. There’s great things coming.”
There are, however, two things about the future of Lanterns that Dillahunt doesn’t hesitate to predict. There will be a Season 2. And Aaron Pierre isn’t going anywhere.
“John Stewart was waiting for Aaron to come along,” he says. Pierre, he believes, is going to inhabit this character “for a long time in this DC universe.”