Edmonton’s favourite son Nathan Fillion is in a Justice League of his own | Canada Voices

You know those revolving metal comic book racks you see in magazine and drug stores? Nathan Fillion had one in his childhood bedroom in Edmonton. He slid his comic books into plastic envelopes with cardboard backing. He displayed them on the rack in sequential order. He stored them in files. His parents, both English teachers, didn’t care what Nathan and his older brother read, as long as they read something, and Nathan “read them like crazy,” he said in a recent phone interview.

Cut to July, 2024. Fillion, a successful 53-year-old actor (Castle, The Rookie), is flying in a harness over Cleveland, dressed in a Green Lantern superhero uniform and sporting a super-specific hairstyle: Guy Gardner’s signature bowl cut. As Fillion glides in for a landing, David Corenswet, in a Superman cape and unitard, crawls out from under a heap of movie debris; Isabela Merced (Hawkgirl) and Edi Gathegi (Mr. Terrific) float down from the sky to join them. “I thought, ‘This is the life I always wanted as a kid,’” Fillion recalls. “There’s no possible way life can turn out the way you plan it, but mine is turning out the way I dreamed it.”

There have been numerous iterations of The Man of Steel, but when the newest, Superman, written and directed by James Gunn, touches down in theatres on July 11, Fillion will become the first-ever live-action Guy Gardner. A quick primer for anyone who didn’t have a revolving rack in their childhood bedroom: In the DC Comic Universe, there are many Green Lanterns. They wear emerald-coloured rings that give them the power to create weapons from their bodies. The two most famous Lanterns are Hal Jordan and John Stewart. Ryan Reynolds played Jordan in the unsuccessful 2011 film Green Lantern; Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre will play Jordan and Stewart in Lanterns, a new Max series due in early 2026.

Gardner was less popular. He’s egotistical, petty, a bit dim and the haircut does him no favours. Yet he’s fearless, and that’s enough for Lanternhood. I’ll stop here, because perhaps by now your head is revolving, but FYI, Fillion-as-Gardner will also recur on Lanterns.

“If you need a Green Lantern, you have a really big problem,” Fillion says. “But if you called for a Green Lantern and you got Guy Gardner, you’d be disappointed. ‘Aww man, we got this guy?’ He’s a jerk. He’s strong-willed, chauvinistic. He had a tough time growing up. He’s got a chip on his shoulder about being passed over a couple of times.” (Fillion’s parents should be proud of his childhood reading retention.)

“And the bowl cut is canon,” he continues. “It says a lot about who Guy Gardner is, because he really does not care what people think.”

The film is a lot of fun, Fillion has a blast being obnoxious, and his hair is a running joke – at one point, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) snaps at Gardner, “That haircut should be against your vows.”

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“That what should be what?” he hollers after her like a bratty schoolboy.

When Fillion was a newbie actor, he wanted his characters – and by extension himself – to be likeable. “That’s a trap,” he says now. “It’s a rookie mistake. It’s far better for your character to have flaws. People can relate to that, and they can also stand in judgment. Both are fun. Guy is 98-per-cent flaws. That’s a gold mine.”

Fillion is uncompromising about one detail: how a film superhero flies. That obsession began in preschool, when Fillion’s teacher would turn on the black and white Superman TV series starring George Reeves while her students ate lunch. Every time Reeves flew, the teacher would say, “I could sure use a cape like that.” To this day, Fillion judges every superhero movie he sees – and he sees them all – by whether the flying looks legitimate. “I can tell when they’re in a harness, when their legs are too far apart, when they get the angle of the landing wrong.”

Filming his own flight scenes wasn’t easy: He’s scared of heights. The harnesses were so tight he had trouble breathing. But his obsession got him through it. “Everything I daydreamed about that got me into trouble when I was a kid, is everything that’s serving my career now,” he says.

Fillion’s career did not zoom upward in a straight line. He moved to New York in 1996 and landed a soap opera, One Life to Live. In 1998 he co-starred in a sitcom (Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place) and a Spielberg movie (Saving Private Ryan). He was in two Joss Whedon series, Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Castle (2009) made him a smart-woman’s TV crush. But his most fruitful professional relationship is with Gunn, who first cast him in Slither (2006), and then kept hiring him: Super, Suicide Squad, Guardians of the Galaxy.

“James’s storytelling style and sense of humour really suit me,” Fillion says. “He loves his job, and I know whenever I work with him I’m going to laugh. Only your very best friends can roast you really hard. With James I look forward to it: ‘How hard is he going to roast me today?’”

In a promotional featurette, Fillion sits in the production’s hair and makeup trailer; he dons a shaggy blond wig, which a hairdresser snips away until the bowl emerges. Gunn tells the hairdresser, “I think we should bleach just Nathan’s sideburns, so when he’s not wearing the wig, he has to walk around with bleached sideburns.”

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“You know I can hear you,” Fillion faux-pouts.

“James tells me I’m the absolute worst,” Fillion says now. “He’ll say, ‘I hired you because Guy is such a jerk, and I know you, so I thought maybe, just maybe you could do this believably.’” Fillion pretends to be hurt, or to accept that Gunn is right. The two never tire of it.

“What James does that’s so satisfying – if you want something to be funny it has to be true,” Fillion says. “Being snarky and clever is great, but it’s not as rewarding as when someone says something true about themselves. A confession that’s embarrassing but true is funny to us.”

Over the course of his career, Fillion has thought numerous times, “‘Okay, now I’ve made it.’ That moment for me continually repeats. But being in a Superman movie? It’s the thrill of my life.”

So if Fillion could have a superpower of his own? “The ability to find anything,” he replies. “Treasure. A missing person. My keys. Oh, it would be great. ‘The cure for cancer? Found it!’” And with that, the kid with his own comic-book store heads off to his Hollywood premiere.