Kyle Chandler nearly turned down Lanterns, but now he’s teasing what’s next for Hal Jordan

Apparently, Kyle Chandler initially didn’t want to join HBO’s Lanterns, and considering what happens to Hal Jordan at the end of the first episode, that hesitation now feels rather funny.

Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan, a veteran Green Lantern who is sent to Nebraska to help train Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart. Lanterns is basically a murder mystery with superheroes, small-town secrets and a much more grounded crime-drama feel.

And Chandler wasn’t exactly sold on the idea when the script was first offered to him. He read the pilot and then put it aside.

So, what actually changed his mind and convinced him to become Hal Jordan?

According to Television Academy, Chandler didn’t grow up as a huge comic-book fan. Actually, he was more into Donald Duck than Green Lantern. So, when the Lanterns offered him the script in September 2024, Chandler’s first reaction was basically to leave it alone. He read the pilot, but didn’t immediately jump at the chance to play Hal.

That changed when he decided to read the script properly with his wife, Kathryn, and daughter, Sydney Chandler, who was visiting at the time. The three of them sat down and did a little family table read.

“I said, ‘Would you guys read this with me? Let’s take characters and just read through the whole thing,’” Chandler recalled. “When we finished, they both literally, at the same time, jumped up off the couch and pointed at me and said, ‘You have to do this.’”

That was enough to change Chandler’s mind. He quickly promised his wife and daughter that he would take the role. He also considers Lanterns one of only a few projects in his career that really stand out to him, alongside Friday Night Lights, Bloodline and Early Edition.

Then Lanterns went and killed him

At the end of episode one, the story jumps forward to 2026, where John Stewart returns to Rushville and discovers what appears to be Hal’s frozen corpse. The body is there, Hal looks very dead, and his Green Lantern ring is missing. So, what actually happened?

“I think it turns out great,” Chandler told Games Radar. “I think there’s a lot of different moves in the whole deal. It’s an exciting poker game.”

Chandler also revealed that the cast didn’t even have all of the scripts when production began. The episodes started coming in as they went along. He said, “We didn’t have all the scripts starting out. They started coming in… it’s not a slow burn. It goes from one world into another, and grows into that.”

That’s pretty interesting because it suggests that the story in Lanterns is going to keep shifting, expanding and throwing new things at us. And Chandler has already warned viewers that they’ll have to watch the show and make their own decision about what they think happened to Hal.

So, while episode one makes it look like Hal Jordan is dead, that’s clearly not the end of the story.

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