Jeffrey Dean Morgan Joins Red Dawn and Talks Lobo!

Where many actors would be concerned about being pigeonholed into a particular type, Jeffrey Dean Morgan could care less. The actor who was the breakout star of Zach Snyder's Watchmen, based on the seminal graphic novel, is now shooting another comic book adapted film, Vertigo Comics' The Losers. Morgan, who first made a name for himself on TV in pivotal roles on Grey's Anatomy and Supernatural, is well on his way to being a major movie star and his name is now bounced around practically every time a comic book movie is green lit, which seems to be just fine with him.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Morgan about making comic book adapted films and asked him if he was concerned about doing The Losers immediately after Watchmen, or if he was worried at all about being typecast. "No, I love it," he said. "We talked briefly about that. It's kind of an untapped world, this comic book world. I read the same scripts over and over again and comic books are just apt. There's this big, wide universe out there. If you've seen the stuff that has come out and the stuff that they're making, it's a trend that's going to continue for a while. I'm happy to be in this world. I love this. I could do comic book movies forever."

I continued by asking Morgan if there was a comic book character in particular that he had his eye on playing. "You know, they're making Lobo right now," the actor replied. "That would be cool. Lobo would be very cool. I don't think that I'm as big as Lobo is, but if you could, transplant Mickey Rourke's body on my head, that would be just great. But I don't know. It's an untapped world for me as well. Every time I kind of hear about something I go out and get the book or I look it up. We'll see. You're always looking for material that's kind of smart and fun and this seems to be where it is right now. The studios are really gravitating towards it. More than I've ever seen them gravitate towards anything in a long time. Comic books are really the thing right now and I don't see that going away for at least the next couple of years."

Since mega-producer Joel Silver and Academy-Award winner Akiva Goldman are producing Lobo as well as The Losers, I asked Morgan if he thought that gave him an extra advantage to getting the part? "That's true. So I do have an in. I'll be elbowing somebody soon,' the actor said. "You know, they had initially talked to me about wanting to do Jonah Hex" he continued. "So I sat down with Akiva. Warner Brothers really wanted me to do it but Akiva was also attached to The Losers. We started talking about it and I said, The Losers is the movie I really want to do."

"Then there was a chance that I wasn't going to be able to do it because of the other movie I was doing," Morgan explained. "I was freaking out because, really, I was wanting to do The Losers for so long. There was a lot of, "Why is he doing this after he just did Watchmen?" But they're totally different characters. Just because they come from the same genre of graphic novels, otherwise they're completely different. I think the best stories right now are coming from that world. I'm just happy my foot's in the door. Like I said, I am not scared of a graphic novel. My agent says, "Well, it's another graphic novel". I don't care. It's better writing than anything else that's out there. The characters are much better," Morgan concluded.

Finally, I asked the actor what he was planning to work on after he finishes shooting The Losers? "I'm jumping back in. I go to work on something about ten days after I've finished shooting. I don't know if I can say. It's a remake of a movie that I love. I don't know if I can tell you yet," the actor said reluctantly. "I knew you were going to ask. Fuck ...Red Dawn. I just love that fucking movie, ever since I was a kid. I guess I'm more or less the old Powers Booth character. There are all the kids and Powers Booth is the pilot that lands in the film and kind of helps them take down the bad guys and blow communism away. It's a really good, young cast. I'll be the old guy in it, which is cool. The guy who is directing it is Dan Bradley who is the second unit director on all The Bourne and Spider-Man movies. He's the real deal. A real good, action director and apparently a really good, stylized director with actors. I'm very much looking forward to it."

The Losers hits theatres hard in 2010.