Jackie Earle Haley, who made fanboys giddy with his one-two double punch of dudes-who-have-gravely-voices and-wear-brown-hats performances (that’d be “Watchmen” and the upcoming Michael Bay-led reboot of “Nightmare on Elm Street”), will now inhabit another geeky favorite as the lead villain in Martin Campbell’s “Green Lantern.”
This, according to the exclamation point-prone webmaster of Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles. He says that Jackie Earle Haley is near the top of the wishlist to play Sinestro, the big bad of the “Green Lantern” universe. Sinestro used to be Hal Jordan’s mentor but went very, very bad. (For more of that backstory see the excellent animated movie “Green Lantern: First Flight,” which was released earlier this year on DVD.) Supposedly the comic book character was based in part on David Niven, with his slicked-back hair and pencil-thin moustache. We think Haley’s a great actor, but why is he wasting his talents here? Payday? He’s also kind of a freaky little weird guy. He’s not exactly the suave and imposing character we imagined Sinestro to be.
In the same post, Knowles speculates that Superman will make a cameo in the “Green Lantern” movie, which is kind of cool but a slippery slope — why not the entire Justice League? If Superman waltzes through in the middle of the movie, it would just be insane and awful. Furthermore, it’s just not gonna happen (though in one early draft there was a quick flash of color that was meant to allude to him, but that’s hardly an appearance). The thing that made the “Hulk”/”Iron Man” crossover stuff work was that it was more like a coda and not part of the body of the movie.
I guess we’ll see. We’re just hoping they’ll find a way to put Sinestro in a brown hat. – Drew Taylor
Update: So Collider talked to Jackie Earle Hayley today and he said this was the first he had heard of it, he’s not screen tested, he’s not been involved at all. Ugh. So what this means is AICN probably talked to someone on the production who said, “oh yeah, they really want Jackie Earle Hayley, he’s one of their first choices,” and they ran with it to get ahead of the curve, but it means nothing right now. We knew about a few people that the filmmakers of “Predators” wanted for example and you know what? We didn’t report it cause it was just those preliminary, “you know who would be great?” conversations and these discussions always take place before an agent or any kind of contact is made. 50% (or much more) it never happens. People need to learn from this that you don’t report, “oh they’re thinking about this person” conversations cause it’s just too early in the game, but film writers also aren’t easily embarrassed for some strange reason. And then perhaps we need to learn to filter that bullshit out and not add to the noise out there, cause we do wince easily at bullshit like this.
Wasting his talents? From what I hear the Green Lantern script is great (he's also DC's best untapped character). Think of Star Wars meets Iron Man and you'll get close to what they're trying to achieve. Look, I know you guys love to give the big blockbusters a hard time, but there's no denying the talent behind this project. It's certainly going to be no art film, but it will be some good science fiction – comic book – space opera fun that you probably will end up enjoying.
I hope you're right. I sincerely do. Just a little skeptical as usual.
Actually, the Sinestro role in the script is very different from how you describe. Still, Haley is a stretch.
Yeah, it would be a shame for Haley to ruin his current career appearing in things like Watchmen and a remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, of all things.
There's no way a concept as stupid and campy as "Green Lantern" would ever make it to production, anyway.