Kyle Chandler Reveals How His Family Convinced Him to Join HBO’s Lanterns as Hal Jordan
From a living-room table read to a Sunday-night HBO slot — how a reluctant actor, a writers’ room trio, and a small Nebraska town came together to power DC’s next major universe.
Kyle Chandler was never the kid hunched over a comic book, tracing the outlines of caped heroes on his bedroom floor. Growing up in suburban Chicago, his pop-culture loyalties lay elsewhere — closer to Donald Duck than to any ring-wielding space cop. The Green Lantern character, who first surfaced in a 1940 issue of DC precursor All-American Comics, meant nothing to him. Neither did Hal Jordan, the fully reimagined version of that same hero who debuted on the printed page in 1959 — six years before Chandler was born — as an ordinary human transformed by an extraordinary power ring. So when scripts for a new HBO series called Lanterns landed in his hands in September 2024, his initial reaction was not enthusiasm. It was doubt.
A Script He Almost Put Down for Good
The pilot script — co-written by series cocreators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King — had been sent to Chandler by his representatives. He cracked it open, read a portion, and then quietly set it to the side. The trio of writers had envisioned Chandler from the outset for the role of Hal Jordan: an intergalactic law enforcement veteran tasked with mentoring a fresh recruit while untangling a knotty murder in the deceptively quiet small-town landscape of Nebraska.
“It was like, ‘Who do we envision? Kyle!'” Lindelof says of Chandler, the Friday Night Lights star who won the Emmy for lead actor in a drama series in 2011. “He’s got the gruff energy, the cynicism, also the nobility, the humor. He’s the entire package.”
— Damon Lindelof, Co-creatorBut the same instinct that made Chandler such a compelling fit also made the writers believe they’d never land him. “He hasn’t done superhero stuff or this kind of genre stuff before,” Lindelof continued. “We’re never going to get that guy.” That assumption, it turned out, was wrong — thanks largely to an impromptu evening at home.
Chandler revisited the script a second time, this time turning it into a family affair. His wife Kathryn and his daughter Sydney — who stars in the FX series Alien: Earth and happened to be visiting her parents in Los Angeles — joined him for an unplanned living-room table read, with each person taking on different characters and working all the way through the script. The result was immediate and unanimous.
“I said, ‘Would you guys read this with me? Let’s take characters and just read through the whole thing,'” Chandler recalls of the spontaneous living-room table read. “When we finished, they both literally, at the same time, jumped up off the couch and pointed at me and said, ‘You have to do this.'”
— Kyle ChandlerLightning in a Bottle: Chandler’s Relationship with HBO
An existing personal connection also eased Chandler’s path to committing. HBO Max original programming head Sarah Aubrey had history with the actor — she’d run Peter Berg’s Film 44 production company during the peak years of Friday Night Lights and was now championing the Lanterns project from the network’s side. With his wife and daughter’s voices still ringing in his ears, Chandler made the decision on the spot. “I was excited from that moment on,” he says. “I’ve got like four lightning-in-a-bottle projects that I’ve done in my life that really stand out: Friday Night Lights, Bloodline and Early Edition.” Lanterns, he declared, would become the fourth.
The stakes surrounding the show are considerable. HBO is placing a significant bet on Lanterns as the third entry in the new DC universe being shepherded by writer-director-producer James Gunn and producer-executive Peter Safran — following Peacemaker and The Penguin. The series will air in the coveted Sunday-night slot starting August 16, a position long associated with prestige drama. Co-starring alongside Chandler are Aaron Pierre as rookie Green Lantern recruit John Stewart and Kelly Macdonald as the blunt, foul-mouthed Sheriff Kerry of Rushville, Nebraska. Despite its comic-book DNA, the show leans far more heavily into hardboiled crime territory — territory that Mundy, a veteran of True Detective, Ozark, and Criminal Minds, knows intimately.
“The good news is you can think outside the box,” says Mundy. “And you’re not constrained by the real world.”
— Chris Mundy, ShowrunnerThe Nebraska Connection: Tom King and the Real Rushville
Of the three co-creators, Tom King was the first to come aboard Lanterns. In late 2022, Gunn and Safran recruited the Eisner Award-winning comics writer into a group of seven creative “architects” whose task was to map out the shape and direction of the new DC Universe. King brought something none of the others could: a direct personal tie to the show’s setting. His grandmother, who helped raise him in Los Angeles alongside his single mother, grew up in Rushville, Nebraska — a real town of 877 people located in the state’s panhandle, roughly 25 miles from the South Dakota border. That rural backdrop, freighted with memory and myth, became the geographic and emotional center of the series.
“My grandmother used to tell me about before and after World War II and what it was like being a little girl there. More cows than trucks. She rode a horse to school. Kind of an idealistic place,” King says, before presenting the town’s flip side. “She would tell me there were secrets, things that we didn’t talk about, like the guy on the hill who was so shellshocked from the war. She was like, ‘That town is as complicated and as dark and as mythical as the city you live in.'”
— Tom King, Co-creatorWhen the concept for a gritty, grounded cop drama set in that world was floated in the architects’ room — a replacement for an earlier Lanterns iteration that had been gestating at HBO since before the pandemic — King seized on it immediately. “As soon as I heard it, I could see the whole show in my head,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much potential there.’ If you got the right actors, the right environment, you could create something — this sounds stupid to use as an adjective — truly HBO peak TV.”
Building the Writers’ Room: Strikes, Backyards, and Whiteboards
Damon Lindelof, whose overall deal at the time was with Warner Bros. and whose credits include three Emmy wins and the creation of Lost, joined when Gunn and Safran offered him his choice of a slate of DC projects. He zeroed in on Lanterns almost at once. “They did the rundown with me and were like, ‘Any of this interesting to you?'” he recalls. “The thing that I gravitated to was Lanterns, because all they said was, ‘We love the characters. It’s a buddy thing. It’s noir. And the guy who pitched this is Tom King.'” Lindelof, already familiar with and admiring of King’s comic work — particularly The Vision for Marvel and Mister Miracle for DC — had met King only once in person, during the pandemic.
Aubrey then brought in Chris Mundy, who needed some persuading. He repeatedly asked her, “Are you sure that I’m the person you want to be talking to?” Yet initial phone conversations with King opened a door, and a breakfast meeting with Lindelof in March 2023 at Great White in Larchmont Village sealed the deal. They talked not about story specifics but simply about whether a creative partnership felt right. It did. Later that month, the three writers spent two weeks hammering out the pilot’s structural framework in the backyard of Mundy’s home near the Paramount lot, with his dogs serving as company.
Two months into their collaboration, the Writers Guild of America called a strike that shuttered production across the industry. Mundy, Lindelof, and King were unable to return to the Lanterns material for 148 days. Work resumed at Lindelof’s offices on the Warner Bros. lot, where the collaborative dynamic — Lindelof comparing the process to “breaking a wild mustang that doesn’t want to be ridden” — eventually found its rhythm. Aubrey later told Mundy that the team had broken HBO’s record for the fastest turnaround on a pilot for a large, world-building series.
“Damon and I are both wonderfully neurotic writers who care very deeply, and Chris is much more Midwest Zen,” King says. “So, it was Damon and me just throwing idea after idea and trying to top each other, and then Chris was like the ref or the umpire, always grounding us.”
— Tom King, Co-creatorIn April 2024, a full writers’ room convened inside a house at Warner Village — a lot section that functions as a generic American neighborhood for productions — where the garage was converted into a creative hub, its walls replaced with whiteboards. About two months in, HBO approved the remaining seven episodes, confirming the show as a continuing series rather than a limited one, with Mundy serving as showrunner.
Casting the Core: Finding Hal Jordan and John Stewart
Assembling the right cast was the make-or-break factor. Hal Jordan presented a particular challenge of calibration. The actor needed to occupy a specific age window — still vital and commanding, yet visibly on the cusp of passing the torch to a younger generation. “You didn’t want to put somebody that looked like they should cash in their 401(k). Kyle was a lightbulb moment,” says Mundy, who had worked on the second season of Bloodline without ever crossing paths with Chandler. “He’s exactly right.”
The search for John Stewart — reimagined here as both a former Marine and a quietly introspective artist — required finding an actor capable of embodying two seemingly opposing energies in the same body. The answer arrived in the form of London-born Aaron Pierre, whose stage work in Othello at Shakespeare’s Globe had moved director Barry Jenkins enough to cast him in a recurring role on Prime Video’s The Underground Railroad. Pierre’s recent screen credits include The Morning Show, a leading role in Rebel Ridge, and the portrayal of Malcolm X in Genius: MLK/X. He has also been cast in Gunn’s 2027 Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow.
“There were a lot of great choices. It went from a list of probably 25 down to seven or eight, then down to three,” Mundy says. “The thing that ended up winning the day for Aaron is a combination we always talk about: For all of Aaron’s physicality — he’s six-foot-four, very fit, boxes, was a sprinter in high school — there’s a real quietness to him, too. He wasn’t having to find either of those two modes. They were both naturally in him.”
— Chris Mundy, ShowrunnerFor Pierre, the role carried personal weight. John Stewart, who first appeared in DC Comics in 1972 as one of the earliest Black superheroes in that universe, had been a meaningful figure for him growing up. “I wanted to see characters that I felt represented me, and I also wanted to see characters that felt competitive within the superhero space,” Pierre says. “John Stewart and Static Shock — characters that resembled me — were equally as capable, if not more capable, than a lot of superheroes. So, John Stewart was definitely an exciting character for me to win. He made me feel seen and represented and confident as a young man.”
By contrast, Kelly Macdonald’s casting as the territorial, profanity-fluent Sheriff Kerry of Rushville was the simplest decision the team made. “She was the only person we talked to,” Mundy says. The Scottish actress, who won an Emmy in 2006 for her supporting role in the BBC One film The Girl in the Café and was nominated in 2011 for her work on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, came to the role through director James Hawes — who helmed the first two episodes and had previously worked with Macdonald on Black Mirror. “I didn’t know anything about the Green Lantern or the comic, but I knew James,” she says. “And the fun jumped off the page, that sort of antagonism between my character and Kyle’s character. I enjoyed the antagonism between him and John’s character, too. Just a lot of fun dialogue, and it’s like a superhero caper as well.”
The remaining cast was assembled by Alexa Fogel — the casting director behind The Wire and True Detective — and includes Garret Dillahunt, known for High Potential, as a conspiracy-minded cowboy. Dillahunt and Macdonald had previously shared the screen in the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men.
On Location: Turning Los Angeles into Rural Nebraska
Principal photography on Lanterns ran for six grueling months beginning in January 2025, with three stages on the Warner Bros. lot serving as the primary base of operations. The unincorporated community of Piru — approximately 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles — stood in for Rushville, while an old military base in Pomona’s Inland Valley accommodated additional exterior work.
Replicating the flat, open horizon of Nebraska’s panhandle in Southern California terrain came at a cost. “A chunk of our special-effects budget has gone to getting rid of mountains and creating Nebraska horizon,” Mundy says wistfully. “But it doubled incredibly well.” Macdonald endured her own frustrations navigating the remote shooting locations. On one occasion, she punched a destination into her phone’s GPS and arrived at what appeared to be open emptiness. “My phone said, ‘You have reached your destination.’ And there was nothing there,” she recalls. “It was so early in the morning, and I was clearly not in the right place.”
One extended shooting day captured both the physical extremes of the environment and the emotional potential of the material. Cast and crew moved through freezing morning temperatures, blazing midday heat, and back again — to the point where protective eyewear became necessary and heat breaks were mandatory. But near the end of that day came a scene that crystallized something essential about the series: Chandler and Pierre, facing each other across the top of a car, finding the crackling, layered dynamic between their characters. “People were in down coats in the morning, and then you’d bake during the day,” Mundy recalls. “Toward the end of the night, there was a little scene where Kyle and Aaron have a conversation across the top of a car, and I remember looking at James, and we were like, ‘Oh, this is going to work.’ There was a vibe between them. They had chemistry.”
“As a creative, you get this electric feeling when you’re in a flow state with somebody, and that’s what that felt like. However many times we needed to do it, we would do it, and we would find different nuances each time.”
— Aaron PierreFor Chandler, that same sequence felt like two fighters sizing each other up in the early rounds. “You’re trying to figure out if your game plan is going to work with this guy, what he’s going to pull out, what that dance is going to be,” he says. “And it didn’t take too long into the shooting. We’re just starting to really make fun of each other, find each other’s weak spots within the characters, and how to jab at each other and piss each other off. And once you find that, you know you can [create a moment].”
One Season at a Time: The Creative Philosophy Behind Lanterns
Despite the weight of expectation pressing on the series, the writing team has adopted a deliberately focused approach. King, whose background in comics accustomed him to thinking far ahead in narrative terms, ran headfirst into Lindelof’s ironclad rule against speculating about future seasons in the writers’ room. The lesson was learned quickly.
“When I’m in the room, I’m like, ‘What’s next?'” King says. “Damon has a rule. You don’t say ‘Macbeth’ in a theater. You don’t say ‘second season’ in a writers’ room. Damon would shut me off and be like, ‘No, son, we don’t talk about that. We’re going to get to it when we get to it, and it’s going to be brilliant. We want to put together the best season of television we possibly can.'”
— Tom King, Co-creatorWhy the Lanterns Light Matters
What makes the story of Lanterns‘ creation compelling is not simply the scale of the production or the weight of the DC brand behind it — it’s the accidental, human-sized moments that brought it to life: a family reading a script aloud in a living room, three writers scattered across a backyard debating ideas while dogs wandered between their chairs, two actors talking across the top of a car near the end of a long night and suddenly knowing they had something real. Kyle Chandler, a man with no particular attachment to comic-book mythology, found himself persuaded by the people closest to him that this was exactly the kind of work worth doing. That instinct, and the creative machinery that assembled around it, is what Lanterns is quietly betting on as it prepares to illuminate HBO’s Sunday nights beginning August 16, 2026.
Lanterns is executive-produced by cocreators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, along with James Gunn, Peter Safran, Ron Schmidt, and James Hawes. The series is a production of HBO in association with Warner Bros. Television and DC Studios.
