'Green Lantern' HBO Max Series Casts Jeremy Irvine As Gay Superhero Alan Scott

HBO Max has found its Alan Scott. Jeremy Irvine, who made his film debut in Steven Spielberg's War Horse and led the Bourne TV spinoff Treadstone, is being eyed to play the LGBTQ superhero in the Green Lantern series on HBO Max, joining Finn Wittrock, who has already been cast as Guy Gardner.

TV Line reports that Jeremy Irvine is in talks to play Alan Scott, depicted in the HBO Max Green Lantern series as a secretly gay FBI agent in the year 1941. Green Lantern, which hails from Arrow-verse maestro Greg Berlanti and Arrow/Legends of Tomorrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim, will be a time-hopping adventure following a multitude of Green Lanterns, Alan Scott, Guy Gardner, and likely the most well-known member of the Green Lantern Corps., Hal Jordan.

But Irvine's character, Alan Scott, actually predates Hal Jordan in DC Comics. Introduced as the original Green Lantern and a member of the Justice Society of America, Alan Scott was created in 1940 before being lost to the ether like many of his fellow Golden Age heroes. But eventually, Alan Scott was reintroduced in the 2000s as a Lantern from a parallel Earth, and more recently, re-conceived as gay, becoming one of the most high-profile gay characters in the DC Universe. The Green Lantern series will be picking up on that later iteration of Alan Scott, depicting him as a closeted FBI agent-turned-superhero in the 1940s, which sounds ripe for compelling storytelling.

Irvine, who made his feature debut in War Horse and has appeared in films like Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (he was young Pierce Brosnan) and The Last Full Measure, joins the already-cast Wittrock (American Horror Story), who plays Guy Gardner, the inexplicably likable "hulking mass of masculinity, and, as rendered in the comics, an embodiment of 1980s hyper-patriotism."

The Green Lantern series "reinvents the classic DC property through a story spanning decades and galaxies, beginning on Earth in 1941 with the very first Green Lantern, secretly gay FBI agent Alan Scott, and 1984, with cocky alpha male Guy Gardner (Wittrock) and half-alien Bree Jarta. They'll be joined by a multitude of other Lanterns — from comic book favorites to never-before-seen heroes."

Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and LEGO Batman Movie writer Seth Grahame-Smith are writing the series and executive producing. Other executive producers include Geoff Johns, Sarah Schechter, David Madden, and David Katzenberg, with Elizabeth Hunter and Sara Saedi co-executive producing Green Lantern.