Lanterns Star Aaron Pierre Initially Agreed With One Fan Criticism Of The Show

However you feel about “Lanterns,” it’s hard to argue with the casting. That’s especially true in Aaron Pierre’s case. The British actor seems to have been born to play John Stewart and anyone keeping up with the press tour for the HBO series should be very aware of how committed to the character Pierre became. It seems that his love for John Stewart even prompted him to question some of the choices the writers made for the character in the first half of “Lanterns” Season 1, though he eventually saw the vision.

“Lanterns” has been a big success for DC Studios and HBO. But it hasn’t been without its share of controversy. Most of that controversy has come from the writers ret-conning Green Lantern lore from the very beginning, and many Hal Jordan fans in particular have been dismayed at how the character has been treated throughout the series. It’s hard to argue with some of the criticism considering Kyle Chandler’s version of the Silver Age hero has, throughout the first season of “Lanterns,” been imprisoned, abandoned, shunned, and shot dead.

But it isn’t just Hal whose comic book story has been radically altered for the TV series. “Lanterns” Episode 5 completely changed John Stewart’s Lantern origin story by having the character refuse to wear a power ring and turn his back on the Green Lantern Corps. Funnily enough, Pierre was less bothered by that than by some of John’s actions in the first four episodes of the season. SlashFilm attended a virtual press conference after the “Lanterns” finale, where Pierre recalled reading the scripts for the early episodes and thinking “John wouldn’t have that.” Ultimately, however, he recognized that it was all part of the character’s evolution.

The bulk of the controversy surrounding “Lanterns” has come from the show’s treatment of Hal Jordan. James Gunn even addressed the controversial decision to kill off Hal. But “Lanterns” hasn’t left John Stewart’s comic book origins untouched.

Whereas the comic book John Stewart was initially brought in as a backup for Hal Jordan, the John of  “Lanterns” is essentially the superhero version of a child sports prodigy with overbearing parents. The show tells the story of how John’s father was passed over for the role of Earth’s first Green Lantern, whereafter he and John’s mother sedulously trained their son to be fearless to prepare him to one day take on the Green Lantern mantle. For the first four episodes, we see a version of John whose entire personality is therefore dictated by his strict upbringing.

For Aaron Pierre, that was tough to integrate into his understanding of the character. “Episodes 1 to 4, we set the stage, and episodes 5 to 8, it’s like the game really begins,” said the actor. “(…) John Stewart really appears from Episode 5 through to 8. That’s John Stewart. Episodes 1 to 4, yes, he’s technically John Stewart, but I had to figure out who the man was before he became the man.” At first, that proved to be harder than Pierre had anticipated. “That was really challenging as a task,” he continued. “Because everything in me, when I’m reading Episodes 1 to 4, as a John Stewart fan myself, I’m going, ‘Ah, John wouldn’t have that.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t think John would let that slide.'” In the end however, he realized that this was all part of John’s journey.

The “Lanterns” finale gave us a glimpse of John Stewart’s DC Universe future, ending with the character charging Hal Jordan’s power ring and establishing himself as an independent Lantern dedicated to protecting Earth. We’ll see how that plays out when John Stewart makes his DC Universe return in the upcoming “Superman” sequel “Man of Tomorrow.” For now, Aaron Pierre is just glad the character ultimately became the man he recognized from the pages of the comic books.

“I had to remember that’s the boy,” said Pierre of “Lanterns” Episodes 1 to 4. “That’s not the man yet. And I had to really lean into that truth and that reality.” The actor obviously had a clear picture of who John was as a person, and recognized that version of the character in the later episodes. “John Stewart in (Episodes) 5 to 8 is who we’re going to, over the years, become familiar with and connected with,” he said. “That’s our John Stewart, whether that’s in the DC Cinematic Universe or whatever it is. But I was like, ‘Who is the boy before he becomes the man?’ And I had to sort of reverse-engineer it.”

Ultimately, Pierre viewed the younger John Stewart in “Lanterns” as someone learning “what it is to be a hero, in terms of understanding what it is to be in the business of saving lives on the scale of being in the Green Lantern Corps.” The actor described the process of tracing the character’s evolution in this way as “challenging, but also really rewarding,” and felt that by the time Episode 5 arrived and we met the 2026 version of John, he’d “earned those moments of confidence, those moments of being sure, assertive, being able to take educated risks.”