Friday at WonderCon, Blake Lively revealed how she nabbed the role of Carol Ferris in Green Lantern: Warner Bros. execs saw her striking turn as a drug-addicted hot mess in The Town and invited her to read for the part. Coincidentally, Amy Adams landed her Lois Lane gig on the heels of her performance in The Fighter, so let's call it a trend -- the Massachusetts Moxie Leading Lady Rule, in which throwing down on the streets of the Bay State proves that you're more than capable of hanging with supermen.
Lively joined Ryan Reynolds at the Green Lantern panel in San Francisco for a Q&A moderated by DC Comics exec Geoff Johns, who also wrote the Green Lantern: Rebirth miniseries. (Co-star Peter Sarsgaard, originally slated to attend, was absent due to a travel issue.) After screening footage from the film, Lively and Reynolds spoke with press about the franchise, both still buzzing from the warm reception. Below, nine highlights of what Movieline learned from Green Lantern's biggest effective public push:
1. First things first: The footage played well. (Good news for WB.) [SPOILERS] The Green Lantern reel, screened earlier to attendees at CinemaCon, began as Green Lantern Abin Sur (Temeura Morrison) narrowly escapes an attack on his spaceship by Parallax and heads to Earth, mortally wounded, where he crash lands and passes his Green Lantern ring on to Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds). A reluctant Jordan takes the ring and power lantern home, where he fumbles with Abin Sur's dying instructions to recite "the oath" - an oath that mystically comes to Jordan as he activates his Green Lantern status for the first time. Later, Jordan finds himself on Oa (a prime opportunity for director Martin Campbell to show off the infamous CG energy suit that clings to Reynolds' body), where he meets his new brethren. The reel ends with flashes of scenes from the film, focusing on the fantastical, otherworldly sequences that take place outside Earth. [END SPOILERS]
2. For what it's worth... Director Martin Campbell and Co. are so committed to honoring the details of the comics that Blake Lively tested 14 different shades of brunette just to get Carol Ferris' hair right.
3. Most actors are required to train extensively in various martial arts or weaponry prior to filming. Reynolds' main action training was in... gymnastics.
4. Blake Lively is eager to make Carol's transformation into Star Sapphire. Mostly, she says, because she'll finally get the chance to kick Reynolds' ass. Though the possibility is there for Star Sapphire to emerge as soon as in the next Green Lantern film, even Lively has been kept relatively in the dark by Warner Bros.
5. "Deadpool's not a villain, he's an asshole." And with those words, Reynolds won over fans even more than he had when discussing his six-pack, dropping charming one-liners, and uttering the nerd-baiting words "Star Wars" earlier in the panel. Reynolds, who played Deadpool in Fox's X-Men dud Wolverine, wants to revisit Deadpool in a standalone movie -- but he wants to do it the "right" way: with a hard R rating.
6. Geoff Johns confirms the news Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov casually dropped the other week, setting off an internet firestorm: A Justice League film is indeed in development, though he can't say anything more and Reynolds admits he hasn't been approached for it yet.
7. Reynolds says that Green Lantern spends about 50 percent of its time set on Earth. This despite the fact that the majority of scenes shown Friday take place in otherworldly settings -- on Oa, in space, flying through the air surrounded by a magical green energy field.
8. Reynolds knows what mythology would be explored for a Green Lantern sequel, though he's keeping details under wraps. But he'd be open to exploring Hal Jordan's dark side and, eventually, to passing the torch to a new generation of Green Lanterns. "It would be exciting to hand it over to one of the others," he said, "Guy Gardner or John Stewart or something, yeah." (Can you say second trilogy?)
9. And finally, back to how Lively got the Carol Ferris call. Her dark turn in The Town, she theorizes, may have shown Warner Bros. that she had the potential to make the transformation that Carol Ferris may undergo in subsequent films. "It was really nice for me that this was a studio that wasn't looking for some girl to have her legs greased up and her boobs out, and that's all that mattered," Lively said. "They saw a character -- a pain-addled, drug-addicted drug mule from Boston -- and said, 'Oh, we want her to be the female face of our next franchise film!' ... [SPOILERS] I think that they saw from my role in The Town that I was able to be dark and angry and be a villain." [END SPOILERS]
Green Lantern hits theaters June 17.