I Am The Face: Matt Ryan As John Constantine, or: Give Me A Cigarette or I’ll Cut You

So back when the TV pilot for a possible Constantine NBC series was announced, we kinda ignored it because it was impossible to tell, at the time, whether DC and Warner Bros. planned to do a real Hellblazer-ish show, or, based on John Constantine co-creator Steve Bissette’s assertion that he wasn’t getting paid because the show was spun out of the original Constantine movie deal, if we were getting a warmed-over TV version of the Keanu Reeves movie bomb.

Let me start by making a correction: at the time Bissette made his assertion, we stated that Reeves’s movie “sucked out loud.” We have since rewatched that movie, thanks to TiVo’s automatically recorded “suggestions,” and I feel safe in saying that, despite my memories of 2005, the movie does not suck out loud. It merely sucks. But it still doesn’t put forth a character that I want to see on a weekly basis.

We were somewhat comforted by the recent announcement that Matt Ryan, a Welshman (which is close to London, right?), was cast as John Constantine… but only a bit. Because we checked out Ryan’s IMDB profile, and found that his highest profile gigs before this were in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake… where Ryan played the pivotal role of “Junkie #2,” and in American TV drama Criminal Minds, where he played the high profile role of, “Someone my parents have seen in Criminal Minds, since no one younger than 50 watches that show. Seriously, it’s the J.A.G. of serial killer shows.”

Look: we John Constantine fans don’t ask for much. When it comes to Constantine, we want four things:

1. An English accent
2. Blonde hair
3. A tan trenchcoat, and:
4. A cigarette.

Somehow, the Constantine movie fucked 3/4ths of these simple elements. However, Geoff Johns Tweeted the first official photo of Ryan as Constantine and… Goddamn.

This photo has 3/4ths of what we want right… the exact opposite 3/4ths of Reeves’s version. And you can check it out after the jump.

Okay, I’ll cop to it: that pretty much is John Constantine… except for one thing. They can Photoshop all the smoke effects they want into a promo image, but John Constantine smokes cigarettes. More to the point: he smokes filtered Silk Cuts. This is important, because it displays the innate Englishness of John Constantine. And I say this as a former smoker: Silk Cuts are a low tar, British cigarette. I know, because I have smoked them; think Merit Ultra Lights in a white pack with purple trim. My knowledge of this is how I know that classic John Constantine writer Garth Ennis is not a smoker, or at least has never been to America: in Damnation’s Flame, where Ennis has Constantine in the United States, Ennis has John comment that once he runs out of Silk Cuts, he’ll have to switch to Lucky Strikes. Luckies are unfiltered tar bombs; this comment would be like having Cheech and Chong say that, once they run out of Acapulco Gold, they will need to switch to Heisenberg’s Blue Meth, or perhaps Plutonium-239.

Which is a digression, but one to hammer home that John Constantine smokes. This is important. Or at least it is to members of Generation X who smoked with Constantine back in his glory days.

What, do you think I sought out Silk Cuts because they sounded manly to an American? To an American, “Silk Cut” sounds like something that is done discreetly in a ladies’ locker room after a burrito lunch.

Why yes, I have been drinking. What’s your point? More importantly: you gotta cigarette?

(via Bleeding Cool)