The actor stars as the DC hero in HBO’s ‘Lanterns,’ which airs new episodes on Sundays
Credit: Phillip Faraone/Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Kyle Chandler would have a trick up his sleeve if he harnessed the powers of the Green Lantern in real life
- Chandler spoke with PEOPLE about the real-life possibilities of the DC superhero’s ring
- New episodes of Lanterns air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO
Kyle Chandler would have a different approach than his Lanterns character if he had the Green Lantern’s ring.
The actor, 60, stars in the new HBO series that debuted on Sunday, Aug. 16, as the titular DC superhero. In the series, Chandler’s Hal Jordan takes a few liberties with his signature ring, which essentially allows the Green Lantern to make anything he sets his mind to.
But for Chandler himself, there’s only one thing he’d want to make if he woke up with the powers of the Green Lantern.
“Oh, [I’d make] my wife a cup of coffee,” Chandler tells PEOPLE of his wife Kathryn, whom he married in 1995.
“Then I wouldn’t have to get out of bed every morning to make her a cup of coffee,” he adds, laughing. “Because I do every morning.”
Credit: John Johnson/HBO Max
Chandler stars alongside Aaron Pierre in Lanterns, which follows an investigation in Rushville, Neb., with an intergalactic, superhero-style twist.
Pierre, who plays Lantern recruit John Stewart, tells PEOPLE he isn’t exactly sure what he’d want to make if he had the powers of the Green Lantern himself.
“I’d try and do something grand,” Pierre, 32, says. “It would be something I’d have to put a lot of thought into. It’s like my tattoos, I’m overly intentional with that, and I think I would be the same with what I manifested.”
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Chandler adds that in an effort to portray two versions of the same hero, he and his costar had to figure out “how these guys are so broken and torn” from the jump.
“They’re not perfect, and realizing too that a lot of superheroes have superpowers, but we’re really just men who have a tool that allows us to do superhuman things, so it is a difference there,” he says.
As Pierre puts it, he and Chandler were “determined to establish a unique working partnership dynamic within the context of this series and this show.”
“I’m so glad we took that plunge. It was a risk. It was something that didn’t have a guarantee of success, but we eventually arrived there,” Pierre adds. “We didn’t know exactly what we were looking for until we found it, and once we did, you couldn’t shut us up. We would start improvising. They would have to tell us to rein it in. Less so Kyle, because Kyle’s character, he has the luxury of improv a little bit more than me. But, yeah, they had to tell us to rein it in sometimes. We would just go. We would just go and go and go and go and go.”
Lanterns, from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Television, also features Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Laura Linney, Jason Ritter, Ulrich Thomsen, Nathan Fillion, J. Alphonse Nicholson and Jasmine Cephas Jones.
New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and stream on HBO Max.
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