The pilot hasn’t even aired yet, and ‘Constantine’ is already shaking up the cast.
British actress Lucy Griffiths, best known for her roles as Marian on BBC’s Robin Hood series and Nora on True Blood, has been featured prominently as the series female lead and Constantine’s foil, a character with supernatural gifts and a tie to Constantine’s past who was to travel with him as they hunted demons.
However it’s been announced that the show has opted to move in a different direction, and Griffiths will no longer be a part of the show, and her role will not be recast. It’s unclear whether or not she will appear in episodes she’s already filmed, but it’s likely.
The replacement foil is Zed, a character who first debuted in the fourth issue of Hellblazer as part of a plot to conceive a new Messiah, but Constantine’s involvement with her thwarted the plan, though it resulted in Zed’s death. At this time, no casting decision for the role has been made.
It’s been noted that Zed is the first of many planned characters from the popular long running Vertigo series to make an appearance. Hailed as the flagship title for the imprint, Vertigo’s Hellblazer (occasionally stylized as John Constantine: Hellblazer) ran for 300 issues and featured some of the earliest works of now popular British writers such as Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman before concluding it’s run in late 2013, when it was rebooted and retooled as Constantine so that the character could better tie in to DC’s primary universe.
The Constantine adaptation has hit it’s share of bumps in the road already; EP David S. Goyer revealed in March that they were unable to convince the network to allow Constantine to smoke on the series, a habit that’s an iconic trait of the character and a pivotal plot point of his most popular story. Regardless, the series will premiere on NBC at 10PM EST on October 24th.
