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.