How ‘Legends Of Tomorrow’ Saved Matt Ryan’s John Constantine From Certain Death… Again

Among the comic book characters who have repeatedly cheated death – sometimes even from the other side of the veil – John Constantine stands tall, proud and scruffy.

Over his long history in print, the Liverpudlian occult detective has repeatedly stared Death right in the face and laughed, and not just in a narrative sense. Although his original solo book, Hellblazer, ran for a commendable 25 years, consequent volumes haven’t fared so well, at least partly due to the reboot-happy culture that has blossomed in the comics world in the past few years. From 2013-15, the comparatively toothless Constantine – which saw the character move from the adultoriented Vertigo imprint to DC Comics’ mainstream label for its line-wide The New 52 reboot – managed a mere 23 issues before morphing into Constantine: The Hellblazer. That book only lasted for a year before being replaced by The Hellblazer in DC’s line-wide Rebirth reboot back in 2016 (yeah, they’ve done this a lot). Sadly, it was recently cancelled, and there are as yet no confirmed plans for another title to take its place.

But you can’t keep a good warlock down for long. Perhaps no one is more acutely aware of this fact than Matt Ryan, the man who has spent the past four years inhabiting Constantine’s iconic trench coat, chain-smoking habit and rampant bisexuality. At the moment, the Welsh actor is filling his days with convention appearances – Sydney and Perth’s Supanova Comic-Con & Gaming events among them – before preparing to head to Vancouver to commence filming as a series regular in season four of Legends Of Tomorrow. But nobody, least of all Ryan, could have expected that this is where he – and, by extension, Constantine himself – would have ended up.

After all, back in May 2015, NBC announced that it was cancelling Constantine, the series that gave the actor his first run at the character, after only one season. Despite its low ratings, it swiftly developed a dedicated fan base who were instantly taken with – among other aspects of the show – Ryan’s brash, magnetic swagger, elegant dishevelment and swoony accent, a characterisation that stood in stark contrast from the quiet, American whoa-ism of Keanu Reeves in 2005’s live-action cinematic attempt. Despite a campaign among its faithful to resurrect the show, NBC stuck by its decision, and it looked like John Constantine – at least, Matt Ryan’s John Constantine – would be relegated to the annals of TV’s greatest could’ve-beens and gone-too-soons.

But John wasn’t done with Ryan; he would soon don the costume again for a much-hyped guest appearance on The CW’s Arrow in its fourth season – a big deal at the time, given the cross-network red tape involved – before reprising the role in animated form for both Justice League Dark (2017) and this year’s Constantine: City Of Demons. He once more returned to the Arrowverse – the shared universe that grew out of Arrow and now includes Legends Of Tomorrow, The Flash and later addition Supergirl – for a few episodes of Legends’ third season before being handed a well-deserved promotion to series regular for the upcoming fourth.

Not bad for a dead man.

“I’ve gotta say, at each kind of corner of the journey with this character, I’ve always thought it was over and that was it, you know?” Ryan says. 

“When the original series was cancelled, I was just about to start a play on Broadway, and I got the call to be on Arrow; we managed to just fit it in before I started doing the play, and then after that I thought it was done… and then we did the Justice League Dark animation, and then they got me back for the Constantine: City Of Demons animation, and now Legends Of Tomorrow. So it’s great, actually. Four years after I started this journey with this character, I’m still playing him, which is a great a thing.”

One would think that the constant uncertainty of whether each time he steps into the role is the last might weigh on Ryan to some extent, but he tells The Music he’s just chuffed to have the chance to still be playing him at all. Besides, the extended foray into Constantine’s psyche has afforded him all the more time to read more comic books – and that can only ever be a good thing.

“I mean, to be honest with you, I was just excited to play him again, and every opportunity that’s come along, through the different mediums, of playing him as well,” Ryan says. 

“I’ve just been excited to explore the character a little bit more. I felt there’s so many great storylines in the comics, and I’m reading them now, still, and there’s so many interesting scenarios in which this character can be. It was just exciting to get back into it and have another crack at it.”

His involvement in the two animated projects between his live-action stints kept the embers of John’s character alive in Ryan in the interim as he juggled other projects. The actor is no stranger to voiceover work, having also lent his sweet vocal molasses to the role of Edward Kenway in the 2013 video game Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, and says the experience of inhabiting a role from the comfort of a recording booth is not without its upsides.

“What’s great is you don’t have spend all that time in hair and makeup and putting costumes on and all that sort of stuff,” he says of taking his performance off-screen. “You’re not worried about camera angles or any of those types of technical bits; there’s obviously a whole other scale and a different technicality to using your voice, in a way, but I found that really fun and really refreshing, and I like to work in as many mediums as possible because all those different aspects of acting and storytelling interest me.”

One would imagine a character such as Constantine – a magic-wielding Sting surrogate in a trench coat, possessed of an iconic look and mannerisms that stem directly from the place and era in which he was created – is a more difficult head to get inside and embody without the assistance of his glorious outfit, his casually flicked cigarettes, his loosened tie and crinkled shirt. However, Ryan says, that’s not strictly the case.

“I mean, there is a certain physicality to the character,” he elaborates. “With all of the great artists and writers who have drawn him and written him over the years in the comics, and there’s various renditions of him, there’s definitely a certain swagger and physicality to the character. [Wearing] the trench coat does help, but it’s a character that’s built hopefully from the inside to out, and hopefully that always will come through. 

“I was thinking, actually, the first time I did [work for] the Justice League Dark animation, I nearly actually took a trench coat into the booth – but I didn’t. I thought it would’ve been fun.”

Turning back to the ill-fated NBC show, it's interesting to consider how much of Constantine’s ultimate failure was a product of unfortunate timing; for example, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the show may have stood a better shot at enduring had it existed just a couple of years later, given the recent apparent increase in success rates for near-cancelled series in finding second lives on alternate networks. Ryan seems reticent to get too bogged down in hypotheticals, but nonetheless entertains the notion; after all, it’s happened for shows such as The Expanse and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and he himself has tweeted in support of Lucifer as that show’s fans have rallied to save it from the axe. 

“I don’t know; obviously, it’s hypothetical to say whether it would or wouldn’t [have been saved],” Ryan muses of Constantine’s chances in another life. “I think what is great is we developed such a great, loyal fan base for the show, and it’s probably one of the reasons why I’m still playing the character today. That’s something I feel really lucky about. 

“Shows get cancelled all the time; there’s so much content out there now, and it is sad when a show gets cancelled that is a fan favourite, but there’s so many different platforms now that I think there probably are the chances that if shows don’t get picked up by their networks, they can probably be shipped somewhere else, so that can be a good thing as well.”

Not that he needs to worry about that any more; as a newly minted member of the Legends crew, Ryan is much more content to just focus on what lies ahead. And what lies ahead promises to take the show – which has, over its past couple of seasons, become the (somewhat unlikely) inheritor of the quality crown as far as the Arrowverse shows are concerned – to some seriously uncharted territory. 

When we last saw the Legends, they were relaxing on a beach in Aruba after a hard-won victory against pouty time demon Mallus and his father-daughter team of acolytes, Damien and Nora Darhk (Neal McDonough and Courtney Ford). They had overcome a severely broken time stream – granted, they broke it – as well as tangling with Blackbeard, Vikings, Julius Caesar, enduring the deaths of two crew members, the departure of two others, and all other manner of trials and tribulations over the course of their third year together. 

The team finally get a moment to just chill out for a second, and our boy Constantine – who had periodically helped with the Mallus problem throughout the season – rocks up with a dragon’s head, because of course the Legends somehow managed to screw the pooch when piecing time back together and unleash flying hellbeasts into our realm. It’s what they do. But, as per their team motto, sometimes they screw things up for the better – and that’s precisely what they’ve done, if the widespread arrival of magical and mythical creatures into our world means Constantine comes along for the ride.

“I think he’s going to fit right in, so to speak, because he’s a misfit – but also, you know, John notoriously is not great with working in a group, so it’ll be interesting,” Ryan says of stepping aboard the good time-ship Waverider. “I’m really looking forward to seeing how all of those relationships develop; the dynamics of all those characters in the same room together, and I’m looking forward to it as everyone else to see what we do with him.”

The broader introduction of more mythical elements to the Legends canon frees up the writers to take the show in some hitherto unexplored directions, into that Justice League Dark realm of wizards, witches, demons and Detective Chimp. Ryan has no word on whether that means we’ll see established DC characters from that corner of the universe (such as sorceress Zatanna, the immortal Morgan Le Fay, and the cursed Etrigan, who infuriatingly speaks exclusively in rhyme) but is just excited to have another chance to take John out for a prolonged spin – and one has to assume that he’s not alone there, although he concedes that whether the run will extend beyond a single season is a “question for the gods”. 

“I’m kind of loath to say anything until we start, you know what I mean?” he explains. “All I’m doing right now is I’ve gone back to a bunch of the comics that I’ve already read, to sort of refresh some stuff; all my old notepads and everything on Constantine. 

“Even though I’ve been playing him over all this time, dipping in and out, I figure we’re going to have a run of the character now, so I’m seeing if there’s anything else I can glean from the comics, and then hopefully take that character into whatever storylines we’re going to be pursuing. I’m looking forward to that.”

Matt Ryan is appearing at Supanova Comic-Con & Gaming expo Sydney (15-17 June) and Perth (23-24 June).