Lanterns’s Poorna Jagannathan Had No Idea What She Signed Up For

Spoilers for Lanterns through episode five, “Lights Out,” which premiered on HBO on Sunday, September 13. 

She’s no man, but she is a Manhunter. Or at least, she was. Poorna Jagannathan’s Zoe Macon is dead for real now, her crystal heart cut out by her lover and Lantern-in-training John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). Her demise marks the end of John and his superhero mentor Hal’s (Kyle Chandler) search for the intergalactic war criminal and leaves Rushville, which Zoe vowed to protect in exchange for the townspeople’s secrecy about her true identity, in ruins. 

Lanterns has waded through a lot of lore in its first five episodes. What started as an intergenerational rivalry between John and Hal, designated by the alien race the Guardians to carry on the legacy and superpowers of the Green Lantern, morphed into a layered puzzle of character motivations. The story bounces between 2016 and 2026, when John is brought in to investigate who killed Hal in the still-destroyed Rushville. The Manhunter reveal clarifies why Rushville is in shambles in 2026 (because Zoe can no longer protect it) and inspires a major decision in John (who quits the Guardians after they forced him to kill the woman he loved). Zoe’s death is a falling ax that splits this season of Lanterns in half, drawing a line between Hal and John’s contentious pre-Rushville relationship and its disintegration afterward.

Jagannathan had no idea she’d been cast as the show’s big bad until she sat down to read the script for episode four, “The Weenie” — when she learned Zoe faked her own death to throw off Hal and John from realizing she’s the Manhunter, Jagannathan thought she took the wrong dose of a weed gummy. Once she processed the revelation, the Deli Boys and The Night Of actress imagined Zoe as a figure used to being in control who fell in love with John because of their similarities: their outsider status, ambition, and conflicted feelings about their responsibilities to the Guardians. Zoe’s careful allure and guarded gaze fall away as she gets to know John, and, ultimately, her certainty in their relationship is her undoing. “There’s an immediate kinship, and she just assumes that John is not going to betray her,” Jagannathan says. “That is the most fascinating assumption of this whole thing: She thinks she knows people, and she’s blindsided by this one person.”

I’m curious how this character was described to you. Was it “human woman hides a secret” or “synthetic being”?  
How does “nothing” sound? [Laughs] I auditioned for this, and the scenes I had were the diner in episode two and the end of episode four, that conversation I have with John after we made love, telling him to leave town. I got the gig — you’d think it would be a great opportunity to tell me that. It didn’t happen. I was speaking to co-creator and showrunner Chris Mundy all the time to figure things out, then I got episode four, where I “die,” and I just was like, That’s interesting and abrupt, but I’m still so happy and honored to be part of the DC Universe. Because I don’t know the genre, I was like, Maybe this abruptness is just part of what happens? People just blow up? In Urdu, the word is khodafez, which is bye-bye.

In Farsi, too. 
Khodafez — it was a major “bye!” moment. I come to the end of the script. It’s pretty late. I have popped a gummy by then — and I read that I’m the Manhunter. I swear to God, I think I’m not reading properly. It was like, What did I just ingest? [Laughs.] I was shocked they didn’t tell me. I was shocked I was playing such a pivotal role. When the first khodafez happened [when Zoe fakes her own death in “The Weenie”], it felt in line with what happens to women of color — an early exit. I was really taken with my lack of imagination, because on the internet, everyone has my number by now. I did not see it coming.

Once you learned that was coming for your character, did it change your approach to her? 
There is a dichotomy between how she presents and how, once she’s found out, she can be her true self. Chris was very adamant: She’s in human form as much as she can be. Over her lifetimes, she has gone from robot to human and learned deep emotions. She has fallen in love — she’s capable of that. She is a victim of her programming more than anything else, and she tries to go against her programming multiple times. She fights against it, doesn’t want it to win, and yet she gives into it every time. There was a scene that is no longer there in which I explained that. She makes the assumption that everyone is built like that, and that is her downfall. She meets John Stewart. No one has ever reneged on a contract with her.

Did you imagine her as capable of regret? Does she regret these betrayals?
Absolutely. She tears up when she talks about Abin Sur¹ — that was baked into the script. Her need to survive is a massive engine for her. She knows the cost, and she will do anything. Zoe waits for a person to be at their most vulnerable point; their lowest point is when the chances of them agreeing to her contract are the highest. She waits until John burns. She waits until she’s his only option for life. She has done that with every single person. She knows that people one day are going to come for her, and she needs to accrue all the ammunition she can.

Zoe’s survival instincts, especially marrying a white man to further protect herself, come through really clearly when she is making her offer to John and explaining why she took the form of an Indian American woman. Zoe tells John that adversity makes you stronger in ways comfort never could. What do you remember about reading that speech and filming that scene? 
I got that speech way before I got the rest of episode five. It was actually a huge relief because I’m always questioning my place in properties like this. When I got that speech, I was like, yes! The through-line of my own life, and my perspective, is that of an outsider. The stuff that I’ve gone through, the immigration stuff, being on an H-1B visa, just trying to survive and keep working — it’s always been hard. Even now when I go to the airport, my heart starts beating fast. There’s this feeling: Holy shit, it could happen any minute. My place, somehow, is insecure. And yet, I am very much in touch with the fact that it is my strength, the fact that I’m an outsider — my way of approaching things, my way of relating to people. I’m not baked into the patterns of growing up here. When I got that speech, there was an in to the character.

The director, Geeta Vasant Patel, wanted it to be still, which was very interesting. I was really trying to work with that, because in the episode, there’s a time crunch. Zoe has to attend to a lot of things. I kept coming back to the beginning of episode five, the scene with Kerry. There’s something about it that’s a little rote. She has had this particular conversation many, many, many times: “Why have you chosen this skin?” She hasn’t talked about that before. There was a real feeling of solidifying it in the moment. 

Zoe realizes she’s betrayed after she has a conversation with Hal about John. It dawns on her, in her last few moments alive, that her contract with John is not going to play out as she wanted. Tell me about that. 
It was a very complex moment. She did make a contract with Abin Sur to live in peace, and although she had to kill him for survival, she has held up that part of her bargain. She honored him this entire time in Rushville, bringing peace and prosperity to this town. She has a very animalistic brain and a very evolved brain, and she has to toggle between these two binaries.

When she has Hal in that position, she knows she can restore peace. She knows the destruction around her is repairable. And she knows that John will not betray her. That is the beginning of that scene. She enters it with a hubris we don’t see from Zoe until then. There are two points where you see what Zoe is capable of and who she might be: the diner scene, where she takes out those two people so easily, and when she comes in to gloat to Hal about her accomplishments. There’s a lot of moments where you see John respect Hal, and there’s a few moments where you see Hal respect John, and [John killing Zoe] is one of them. 

That last moment, where I realize that John Stewart has a gun to my head, the smile is about the fact that she never thought she’d lose, and she never thought she would lose to someone who’s in love with her. When I read this script, I was so struck by the lack of binary in every character. The scene in episode four — the day I shot it, one of the writers, Breannah Gibson, was on set with me. I didn’t see it in the script, but Bre was like, “This is the scene where you go as close to the edge as possible in telling John who you are. I’m the Manhunter. Look at this place. It’s not what you think. It’s not what you’ve been told. It’s peaceful. Leave, please, because I want you to stay alive. What you are being fed isn’t reality. I think that is the bigger lesson: Even the Guardians can make mistakes, and even they are deceptive about how they approach fixing their mistakes. Before that morning, I was going to play that very differently, then Bre took me through her thinking on how she wrote that scene. John gets it in that scene. He registers what might be happening.

What was working with Aaron Pierre like? 
He stayed in character the entire time. I don’t know Aaron as anything but this character. One day, something happened, I don’t remember what, and he said, “Sorry, love” to me in a British accent. And I was like, “Wait, what?” [Laughs.] He never broke until that second, and then he went back. That’s when I had a glimpse of this other life.