'Watchmen' HBO Series Cast Adds Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, And More

HBO and Damon Lindelof's take on Watchmen is officially happening, and now we know who will be starring in the show. Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Adelaide Clemens, and Andrew Howard have all joined the Watchmen HBO series cast. But who are they playing?

Who watches the Watchmen HBO series? You probably will, especially when you see who just joined the cast. Variety reports Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Adelaide Clemens, and Andrew Howard have all joined the series, which is being spearheaded by Lost and The Leftovers' Damon Lindelof. That's quite an interesting, unexpected cast – who would've guessed Don Johnson would star in Watchmen?

King has a history with Lindelof, having appeared on The Leftovers. Don Johnson has appeared in Miami Vice and Django Unchained. Tim Blake Nelson has had an eclectic career as a character actor, appearing in films like Minority Report, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and more. Gossett Jr. was the first African-American to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (for his part in An Officer and a Gentleman). Clemens has had roles in The Great Gatsby, Silent Hill: Revelation, and the TV show Rectify. And Howard was in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Agents of SHIELD, and more.

So who are all these actors playing? We have no idea. There's no word on that yet, and while it's fun to speculate, it's almost impossible to know. For instance: if Lindelof was doing a straight adaptation of the graphic novel, Tim Blake Nelson would make an amazing Rorschach, and Don Johnson would make a pretty good Comedian. But the HBO Watchman show isn't a straight adaptation. As we previously reported, Lindelof says the show is set decades after the events of the Watchmen comic, which means most of the original characters will now be old or dead. "The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica," Lindelof said in his letter to fans yesterday, adding:

"Some of the [show's] characters will be unknown..New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising yet familiar set of eyes...and it is here we will be taking our greatest risks."

In other words, there's a good chance that some, or all, of these actors are playing brand new characters in the Watchmen universe.

There's a lot riding on HBO's Watchmen series, simply due to the fact that so many people hold Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' iconic graphic novel in such high esteem. There's also the fact that no one – and I mean no one – has been able to adapt something Alan Moore wrote to the screen with any sort of success. The From Hell film? Terrible. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Awful. And of course, Zack Snyder famously tried to bring Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen to the screen by literally recreating entire panels, and yet even then, he failed to fully capture what made Moore and Gibbons' book so special.

For his part, Lindelof seems to know that it's going to be near-impossible to please fans of the graphic novel, and seems content to try to do something new while also remaining as faithful as possible to the world Moore and Gibbons created. As he said in his statement about the show:

"This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built...but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev. Ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of the World is off the table...which means the heroes and villains–as if the two are distinguishable–are playing for different stakes entirely."