Guy Gardner Is Back! Nathan Fillion Breaks Down His ‘Lanterns’ Debut and Why He’s the DC Universe’s Main Throughline

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 6 of “Lanterns,” now streaming on HBO Max.

Nathan Fillion has had a hard time convincing his friends that he’s actually in “Lanterns” after being absent for the first five episodes.

“Thank goodness HBO has been kind enough to use my face up on the placard on the screen!” he quips to Variety.

But after tonight’s episode, Guy Gardner (Fillion) is back in action, revealed to be the new Green Lantern after John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) leaves behind the ring for good. The comedic character, complete with his signature bowl haircut, appears in the 2026 timeline as John returns to Rushville and meets up with Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) one last time before Hal is found dead in the bleachers.

“It’s nice that there’s a bunch of us witnessing the birth of the DC Universe that’s being thrown at us in these pieces, and Guy Gardner is becoming a thread in the backdrop,” Fillion says. “He’s a very public part. I think that says a lot about who he is.”

In the episode, Guy visits John in jail after getting the distress signal from Rushville. While Guy is initially reluctant to bust him out, John hits him where it hurts the deepest: “Everything you have is because I didn’t take it.”

With that, Guy is “beholden” to someone for the first time in his life.

“Wearing the ring, and having the mantle of Green Lantern, is far more important to Guy’s ego than it is to Hal and John’s. The stakes are higher for his sense of identity,” Fillion says. “He doesn’t like that he owes John Stewart anything — John Stewart needs a favor, and that’s what he leans on.”

For whoever’s counting, Guy was selected as the third-best Green Lantern option on Earth after Hal and John.

“I certainly think there’s a chip on Guy’s shoulder, but I think it’s satiated with the fact that he’s the only guy in the room with the ring,” Fillion says. “That status suits Guy very, very well. Guy is a fellow who’s really comfortable throwing his weight around.”

Tied to Guy’s ego is his public persona. The first time audiences see his face in the series isn’t in the prison scene with John, but a cardboard cut-out advertising Electro Punch in the local grocery store.

“Guy is very concerned about brand and corporate sponsorship, he has financial goals. He wants to open a bar, he has retirement plans; he’s not a dummy. I think he’s TikTok literate, he understands trends. I think he’s done more than one dance or two,” Fillion says with a laugh. “That’s part of his schtick. He wants to not just be Green Lantern, but a famous Green Lantern.”

Fillion admits he was surprised when he got the call to reprise the character in “Lanterns,” a much more grounded show than Guy usually fits the mold for.

“My concern was consistency. I knew there was going to be a shift in tone. What I didn’t want was for there to be a shift in the character himself,” Fillion says. “So I just likened it much to, if you were to spend a weekend in Metropolis, or spend a weekend in Gotham — you’d be the same person, but you’d have very different weekends.”

Fillion grew up reading comic books and, long before the current reconception of the DC Universe, he was a voice actor in the mid-aughts Cartoon Network series “Justice League Unlimited.” (Fillion, beloved to genre fans as the lead of the brilliant-but-canceled sci-fi series “Firefly,” also voiced characters in “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.”)

“We collected secondhand comic books in stacks about two feet high, and it was a real mishmash across the board. But I got a real, solid knowledge base about pretty much everything DC, Marvel. I confess I didn’t see the value of Guy Gardner back then,” Fillion says. “I, like many people, disliked Guy Gardner. I think we’re kind of supposed to dislike him.”

When tasked with introducing Guy in James Gunn’s “Superman” movie, which was released in summer 2025, he had to “dig deep” to tell the character’s story.

“Because we haven’t delved into his particular past in any great detail, I’m able to go through his history and cherry pick what I want to pull from to portray the character. For me, he’s this tremendous jerk — he has to have a reason to be a jerk,” Fillion says. “The idea that he was at one point passed up, the way he was raised, his relationship with his father wasn’t tremendous. So he has this need to prove himself. He’s fearless in that way.”

One example Fillion points to from the comics is when Guy was hit by a bus and spent time in a coma. “The coma is what flipped that switch for Guy Gardner,” he says. “I think he has a little bit of brain damage.”

“Lanterns” is just one piece of the quickly expanding DC Universe under co-chairmen Gunn and Peter Safran. As for the underperformance of this summer’s “Supergirl” in comparison to “Superman,” Fillion says: “I can’t tell you much as far as to how people responded. I can tell you, though, how I respond. I really enjoy when the right person is selected for the right job.”

“Milly Alcock, I think her take on Supergirl is brilliant, I am so pleased with these favorite characters of mine coming to life,” Fillion continues. “I have yet to be disappointed by anything James Gunn does, which is great because he puts me in most everything he does!”

In fact, Fillion and Gunn’s creative collaboration goes all the way back to 2006’s “Slither” and 2010’s “Super,” long before Gunn took over the reins of the MCU’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and, later, the future of the DC Universe. This “Lanterns” episode marks just the first encounter between Guy and John, who are both set to appear in “Man of Tomorrow,” Gunn’s follow-up to “Superman,” which will release in 2027.

“Within this secret club of the superhero community, there is yet another layer of secret club, the Green Lantern community,” Fillion teases about the highly anticipated blockbuster. “It delves one club deeper than the rest of, let’s call them the Justice Gang.”

As for how “Lanterns” fits into the larger DC Universe, the show’s grounded approach is creating new inroads.

“Up to this point, we’ve been given the idea, ‘What if we took Batman out of that universe and put him into our world? What if it was real in our world?’” Fillion says. “James Gunn’s universe is, ‘What if we lived in that universe, the comic book universe where giant monsters appear, where there’s robots and where there’s fantastic happenings constantly?’”

“This concept is new to us, and I’m really enjoying watching it unfold as a universe,” he continues. “We’ve spent a week in Metropolis, and now we’re going to Middle America. We’re going to farm country. I’m so anxiously awaiting a dip into Gotham.”

Guy will also soon be seen in the animated show “Mister Miracle,” which Fillion has already recorded the voiceover for. As Fillion puts it, it’s a natural extension of how anybody living in the DC Universe would be “inundated” with the character while walking around town and driving by billboards.

“It’s really exciting for me, personally, because I think I hold the record for most characters portrayed in the MCU, and now I hold the record for the most projects by a DCU character,” he says. “This is a nice place to be. I’m in the catbird seat.”