Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre on turning Green Lanterns in DC's new show

When Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre first came together for Lanterns, they were stepping into one of DC’s most anticipated on-screen partnerships. Chandler plays veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan, while Pierre takes on the role of John Stewart, the younger recruit who finds himself learning from one of the Corps’ most experienced members.On paper, Hal and John are very different. One is a seasoned Lantern with years of experience behind him; the other is entering a world he is only beginning to understand. Their relationship is expected to be a crucial part of Lanterns, the eight-episode DC Studios series that takes the Green Lantern mythology into a grounded murder mystery set against the backdrop of the American heartland.Interestingly, the actors revealed in an exclusive chat with India Today that they found themselves discovering their own chemistry in much the same way their characters do i.e by spending time together, figuring each other out and realising that their differences were not necessarily as significant as they first appeared.For Pierre, there was already a sense of anticipation before he even met Chandler. Chandler had been cast as Hal before Pierre joined the series, and the actor had heard enough about his future co-star to know that the pairing could work. “For me, Kyle was cast before me. I was aware of that casting information and I was just very excited by it. You know, I was very excited to meet him in person and I had a few people who Kyle knew, mutual associates, who, when they spoke about Kyle, they said all the things that I enjoyed the most in a collaborator and a teammate,” Pierre tells India Today. “They shared how much he loves to improvise and be present and devise things on the spot and really go as far as he’ll be permitted to go and that’s very much how I operate,” he recalls. “So I knew that when I went in for that final reading that it was going to be fun.”And Pierre had a rather unusual way of testing that chemistry. “I knew the fact that I was there in a brace recovering from a distal bicep tendon repair was going to be fun and we were going to use that somehow, some way,” he reveals. Their first meeting quickly settled any doubts. “But it was, I just knew it was going to be great and from the first meeting it was just a joy. You know, he’s a good man,” Pierre adds.Chandler, however, had a very different starting point. While Pierre had already heard stories about him from mutual acquaintances, Chandler admits he knew virtually nothing about the actor who would play John Stewart.“Well, it certainly wasn’t the same as his,” Chandler laughs when asked about his reaction to Pierre’s casting. “I didn’t know Aaron. I did not know Aaron. I didn’t know anything about him, tell you the truth, other than the work that he’d done.” There was no extensive preparation or advance scouting involved. Chandler simply met Pierre through the audition process and the two clicked. “I don’t think I talked to anyone personally about Aaron or anything, but the audition went really well and we had a good time together,” he recalls. “Then we went and did the reading together and we had a lot of fun doing the reading.”But, as Chandler points out, an audition can only tell you so much about a potential co-star. “Then you just never know until you get in a work atmosphere what someone’s really like,” he observes.That was where the real test began. And it didn’t take long for Pierre to discover one very particular aspect of Chandler’s personality. “He might have said all these nice things about me. He found out that when we’re sitting in a car for 10 hours and in hot weather and waiting for the thing to start, he didn’t know that I tend to talk constantly,” Chandler admits, adding, “And he can’t get out of the car because there’s a camera attached to it. And it became real pretty quick, us playing with each other with the roles and our own personalities and sharing information. And we had a really good time.”For him, that process of building trust between actors requires a certain amount of openness. “You know, it takes a little effort to open yourself up to share who you are so you can get to the point of, ‘Let’s find out who we are now and let’s work this thing out and start playing the game’ and expedite it as well,” he says. That openness, Chandler believes, was particularly important because the two are “very different.” “So it was very much like it was like brothers picking on each other,” he says, summing up their dynamic.Pierre picks up on that observation, but takes it beyond the playful teasing.“Yeah, that’s a really good point,” he agrees. “I think sometimes in life, sometimes in life just because of inherently how it can be, when you meet someone who maybe not fundamentally is completely different but they have enough differences to you where you’re not on the same page about everything, you never really oftentimes get to still know that person to a really deep level.”For Pierre, the experience of working on Lanterns challenged that instinct to judge compatibility based on first impressions. “Oftentimes just on the first interaction it might be like, okay, there’s enough differences that we may not necessarily need to pursue discovering more about one another,” he explains.The six months they spent working together changed that. “But when you are in this context, we had all those six months and what’s really interesting is you learn that there is actually far more that you share the same perspective on than don’t,” Pierre reflects.It became an unexpected takeaway from the experience for the actor. “And it was just a lesson for me as a young man,” he says. “It was a lesson for me that sometimes the people who may be, on first interaction, you may not hypothesize or guess are on the same page as you, actually they can be the people that understand you the most and comprehend who you are as an individual.”Lanterns is available on Jio Hotstar in India.- EndsPublished By: bhavna agarwalPublished On: Aug 26, 2026 09:26 IST