By 
Even though he does incredible work in indie films such as A Different Man and I, Tonya, Sebastian Stan is most associated with superhero movies. Stan has been playing Bucky Barnes a.k.a. the Winter Soldier since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, and will continue to reprise the role in this year’s Avengers: Doomsday. And now there are rumors that Stan will join the cast of The Batman: Part II, making the jump from Marvel to DC.
However, Stan tried to join the Distinguished Competition the same year that he became James Buchanan Barnes. Stan told the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast in 2024 that he had auditioned to play Hal Jordan in the infamous 2011 flop Green Lantern. “I remember getting there, and it was like, me, Justin Timberlake, Jared Leto, Ryan Reynolds, and maybe one other person,” Stan recalled. “And I’m looking at these guys, going, ‘I’m fucked. There’s no way this is happening for me.’”
Obviously, it didn’t happen for Stan, as Reynolds got to play Jordan, a reckless test pilot who gets picked to join the intergalactic police force known as the Green Lantern Corps. Directed by Martin Campbell and co-written by Arrow-verse architects Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, Green Lantern brought to the screen one of DC’s most popular superheroes and boasted a cast that included Blake Lively, Tim Robbins, and Mark Strong. Yet, the film bombed, barely making back its budget and getting roundly mocked by critics.
There’s no one thing to blame for Green Lantern‘s failure. The concept, and especially the name “Green Lantern,” is a hard sell to general audiences, and no one involved in the project was doing their best work. Moreover, Hal Jordan can be a tricky character to pull off, even in the comics (the hero’s shortcomings range from dating a 13-year-old to going nuts and killing all of his friends to being a cop in general).
But Reynolds’s glib, self-satisfied take certainly didn’t help things. We first meet the character dashing out on a one night stand and joking about how he forgot her name. At work, Jordan participates in a flight exercise against a drone that his employer hopes to use to secure a much-needed government contract. Instead, Jordan chooses to show off his pilot skills, making the drone look bad, destroying his jet, and losing the company the contract. When Jordan gets the power ring that gives him his Green Lantern abilities, he first uses it against a couple of guys who are mad at him… because he got them all laid off when he decided to show off against the drone.
Again, all of these story problems come from the writers and the director. But Reynolds delivers all of his lines with maximum snark, because that’s the tone he does best. Stan, however, can certainly play a stoic hero. But as his indie work shows, he’s great at playing weird losers and frustrated sad boys. In other words, he could have taken that same material, scenes that ask us to cheer when Hal Jordan is a selfish jerk, and made them interesting.
Alas, it didn’t happen, so Green Lantern flopped and the concept disappeared from live action until Nathan Fillion popped up as Guy Gardner, a different Green Lantern jerk, in last year’s Superman. Later this year, Kyle Chandler will try his hand playing an older and hopefully wiser Hal Jordan alongside Aaron Pierre as John Stewart in the HBO series Lanterns.
As for Stan, things worked out pretty well, by his own admission. “Looking back, I’m almost glad it didn’t [work], because I don’t know if I could have handled that level of attention like some of those guys,” he conceded. Clearly, he can handle it now, whether in indies, the MCU, or the DC Universe.
The post Before The Batman: Part II, Sebastian Stan Almost Played a DC Hero appeared first on Den of Geek.
