The cast and creative team behind the new DC-inspired series Krypton appeared at WonderCon in Anaheim this past Saturday to discuss what’s in store for the inaugural season of the show, which premiered last week on Syfy, and teased that a visit to present-day Earth is coming.
Executive producer and showrunner Cameron Welsh confirmed that “we will see where Adam (Strange) came from -- from modern-day Detroit.” Welsh was joined on the panel by actors Cameron Cuffe (Seg-El, Superman's grandfather), Georgina Campbell (Lyta Zod), Wallis Day (Nyssa Vex) and Shaun Sipos (Adam Strange), as well as Dan Evans, DC Entertainment’s VP, Creative Affairs.
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Evans discussed how the show has been in development since 2014, and that the past four years have given everybody a chance to make the show fantastic. “You’ve got to let it bake," he told the crowd. "It’s a really ambitious show for us.”
Cuffe said that the show’s pilot, which aired last week, is vastly different from what was originally shot -- only 25 percent of what aired was from the original pilot. “We re-shot about 75 percent of it.”
“It has a similar vibe in terms of story,” Campbell said. "Adam Strange wasn’t in it. That was something that came later.”
Cuffe said that all of the sets are practical sets -- massive sets that physically exist, rather than green screen -- that were built specifically for the series, which is filmed in Belfast, Ireland. “We changed our location from Belgrade in Serbia to Belfast in Ireland. Some of the sets just didn’t make it over, but that gave us a chance to make them bigger and better and more detailed.”
Welsh said that the character of Adam Strange was then brought in to bring in the “space element of the DC Universe. We want to use him to explore the more cosmic part of the DC Universe. Adam has relationships with Rann and Thanagar, which are places we’d like to explore in the future.”
When asked what source material or characters from DC history will influence the show, Welsh said that John Byrne’s World of Krypton comic from the ;80s is their primary influence. David S. Goyer came up for the idea of the show when working on the Man of Steel film.
“He concluded that [the history of Krypton] is a really undeveloped part of the Superman mythology,” Welsh said. They decided to set it 200 years in the past to give it room to breathe. “By making it a couple of generations removed, it gives it some freedom. One of the challenges is to make it not feel like a prequel. We want to take away that sense of inevitability that the audience has knowing that in the future Krypton explodes. We didn’t want the audience to feel like we were just treading water until we got to this inevitable conclusion.”
Cuffe said that the show is not a prequel. “The second that Adam Strange shows up, it changes the timeline. Everything is different now. I like to think of this as Flashpoint meets Guardians of the Galaxy.”
Welsh also noted that as a society, Krypton has evolved past any hangups about gender, race or sexuality -- and it sounds like Adam Strange will be a particularly adventurous character as the series progresses, hinting that his sexual preferences will be explored in upcoming episodes. “I don’t think that Adam’s going to live his life with one hand tied behind his back,” Sipos said.
An audience member asked if we would be seeing the Green Lantern Corps on the show at some point, and Welsh responded that “it would be something that would be a natural fit for us.” Evans then shot that down, saying that audiences would probably see The Omega Men (who count Green Lantern Kyle Rayner as a member in the comic books) on the show before they would see the Corps.
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“DC isn’t just Earth, it isn’t just Metropolis or Gotham," Evans said. "The DC Universe is huge -- it’s multiple universes.”
Evans promised that the show would open the door to other parts of the DC Universe, allowing them to introduce characters that you may not see in other shows, but that will fit comfortably here -- and maybe some different versions of familiar characters.
Krypton airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on Syfy.