SDCC EXCLUSIVE: Brian Bloom Talks Voicing Adam Strange in Green Lantern: Beware My Power
Green Lantern: Beware My Power is now out on Digital and Blu-Ray and we got the chance to sit down with voice actor, Brian Bloom about the new movie. Bloom voices Adam Strange in the new John Stewart centric pic.
Can you talking working with Jamie Gray Hyder:
“We actually go back and we did a Call Duty game together where we played the two leads. So, we have a history together. I’m not afraid of Jamie. No, I actually am a little bit.”
Can you talk about Stranger’s relationship with Hyder’s Hawkgirl?
“Yeah, they meet, they’re on opposite sides of the war and they don’t trust each other. But Adam Strange knows something that Hawkgirl doesn’t know, and then unfortunately there’s something that they both don’t know. In many ways, this story is about certain people benefiting from instability and war rather than working toward peace for the greater good.”
When Adam Stranger first appeared in comics he was very much inspired by classical superheroes, like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers; this one, it’s very different. What inspired your take on Adam Strange?
“I wasn’t really given much of an opportunity to do anything except read this when it came my way and go to work on it immediately. One of the things that I noticed was, in one of his earliest scenes, he’s really in need of a second chance that he doesn’t think he deserves. Again, I think that’s something that many of us can understand whether we’ve been there or not. There’s something very human about that. I like this version of Adam Strange because of the humanity, how much he loves his family, how much pain he feels about being estranged from his home and- your home isn’t only a place, it’s the people that you love and there’s nothing that’s super science fiction or superhero about any of those things that I just said. And that makes it kind of grounded and interesting.”
Can you talk a little bit on how you found the voice for the character?
“I found the voice for this character by thinking about the way that we meet him, which is down and out, and he hasn’t spoken to anybody in a long time. Also, he doesn’t have his confidence or his center when we meet him, so I took the voice up into the throat a little bit and thinned it out and found some texture in there. Then, across whether it comes through or not in terms of the performance, I was looking as he found more of a center and more of his confidence and more of himself. Again, I put it down in the diaphragm where your center and your presence kind of comes from. In the end, he finally makes that sacrifice without giving away too much. I wanted to make sure that you could feel the emotion of it on some level, but also let the animation do the talking in some cases, too.”
What kind of a relationship does he have with the other heroes?
“I think everybody in this story is on shaky ground with one another, until they finally realize that the enemy of my enemy, kind of a scenario, is being brought to bear here and being explored. So, there’s a lot of adversarial, a lot of conflict, a lot of mistrust, a lot of misunderstandings, and they all need to overcome that to solve this problem.”
Would you say when all is said and done that Strange considers himself a hero?
“He definitely doesn’t consider himself a hero and I think what’s interesting about that is when he finally does in this story, find the will to trade off something on a mortal and terminal level for the greater good he’s doing something heroic, but not because he’s expected to. In fact, again, careful with spoilers, he’s doing it. It’s a surprise to everybody. The thing that he does for the greater good. When I say the other heroes, I guess I really mean because they all have superpowers, and although in the cannon, as you were sort of implying before Strange does, I would say in this story, his real superpower is his mind. He’s a scientist and what he knows about science, what he knows about the conflict, what he knows about the universe, what he knows about the Zeta beams, what he knows about how they can be used. I think that’s very grounding too. He’s using his knowledge and his heart in this story. He’s using things that we all at this table have. That’s kind of cool.”
You’ve played both heroes and villains in your career. As an actor, do you lean towards one more than the other?
“Well, I love playing both, but playing villains is a lot of fun. You get, especially with animation sometimes, a little bit more theatrical, but remember the villain is a hero in his own story too, so I think the case could be made that there’s not really much of a difference.”
Green Lantern: Beware My Power is available now!
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.