While everyone is still buzzing from the excitement of Mark Strong possibly coming on board Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern to play Sinestro as was reported yesterday, we just spoke with Mr. Campbell about his new thriller Edge of Darkness starring Mel Gibson–a pleasant and informative interview you’ll be able to read in full very soon–and we did get in a couple questions about GL.
We mainly talked with Campbell about his interest in the project and the basis of the story, which is essentially Hal Jordan’s origin, but when we asked whether there might be any hints or set-up for a future Justice League film, he instead told us the following:
“I think it will stick closely to the origin story, but we all know Sinestro, for an example, is a character who goes over to the dark side, and of course, Carol, played by Blake Lively, in later versions becomes a bad guy as well. I think people will be able to see forward to the characters that in the comic went on to (become bad guys)… but people will be ahead of us on all that I think.”
Of course, there’s a chance we’re reading too much into that, but it seems pretty clear the movie will be introducing Sinestro when he was still a member of the Green Lantern Corps and a mentor to Hal Jordan during his early days as Green Lantern, rather than just having him show up as the main villain. Those readers only vaguely familiar with Green Lantern or Sinestro (or haven’t been following the comics in the last four years) might not realize that very important aspect of the relationship between Hal and Sinestro, explored most recently in Geoff John’s retelling of Hal’s story in the “Secret Origin” series (collected into a hardcover we highly recommend that you can pick up from Amazon). From Campbell’s statement, it’s clearly something that will be explored in the movie as well.
Those who are only familiar with Strong’s work in Sherlock Holmes might not realize how good he is at playing layered villains, something more evident from his roles in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies and Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, so it should be interesting to see him playing a mentor to Ryan Reynolds, even if it’s more of a military relationship, almost like an officer to a private.
We’ll run the rest of what Campbell said about Green Lantern with our full interview for Edge of Darkness, which opens on January 29.
