Zack Snyder reveals that Wayne T Carr was set to play the Emerald Knight in his Justice League recut, before Warner Bros vetoed the idea.
At Justice Con this weekend, a Justice League fan event held to raise money for suicide prevention, Zack Snyder has been chatting about his well-received cut of the film, and he dropped a nugget of information that fans have been guessing at for a while.
For some time now, we’ve known that Snyder wanted to include an appearance from a Green Lantern in his version of the film (alongside the existing, yet fleeting appearances of Yalan Gur and Kilowog) and we’ve also known that the Lantern in question was set to be John Stewart.
Now, thanks to Snyder, we know who played Stewart in the filmed, but ultimately unused scene that Snyder says he shot on his driveway.
The actor in question was Wayne T Carr, who Snyder reveals he met through Cyborg actor, Ray Fisher. Says Snyder: “I said, ‘Look, there’s a chance that this doesn’t make it in the movie, I’m not 100% sure he thought it was real, legit.”
Despite Snyder thinking that Carr, who is next set to appear in Joel Cohen’s The Tragedy oO Macbeth, might be thinking the whole thing was some weird sort of wind-up, the scene was duly shot and was set to go into the film before the Warner Bros brass vetoed it. Presumably because it had other plans for the Green Lantern franchise.
Snyder, as he has before, reiterated that this caused something of a dispute between him and the studio, almost leading him to abandon his cut of the film. “We did have a Green Lantern scene in the movie that the studio asked me to take out that I did also shoot here in the driveway with an amazing actor who was going to play John Stewart. Then the studio, when they saw the movie, and they saw that I had done every single thing that they had asked me not to do, we had come to a bit of a loggerhead.”
Ultimately, Snyder would compromise, purposefully choosing to use another black actor, Harry Lennix, who portrays the Martian Manhunter in the film, to ensure that as far as the studio would allow he wasn’t removing black actors from the film.
With the ‘Snyder-verse’ officially now dead as it stands, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see Carr reprise his role as John Stewart, but if the unique and protracted saga of Zack Snyder’s Justice League has taught us anything about Hollywood, it’s that you can never say never.
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