Finally it really feels like The Watchmen movie is happening. It has been known for a while now that 300 director Zack Snyder is helming the film. Now we know who will be playing the main characters.

The Comedian:
The Comedian is a cigar-chomping, gun-toting vigilante-turned-paramilitary agent. During some of the series’ most intense moments, he has shown himself to be a nihilist with little regard for morality or human life.

The Comedian will be played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Night Owl:
Hollis J. Mason (1916-1985)
At the age of 12 his father left the family farm in Montana and moved to New York City, working at Moe Vernon’s Auto Repairs.

Starting out as a New York City policeman in 1938, he was inspired by Action Comics’ Superman and the real life exploits of Hooded Justice to take up the life of a vigilante. He was nicknamed Nite Owl for spending his evenings working out in the Police Gymnasiums as much as possible and going to bed at 9:00pm to rise for a 5:00am work out before donning his badge and uniform.

His costume was designed to free his arms and legs while protecting his chest, abdomen and head with a tough leather tunic. With the tunic hiding his hair, a domino mask concealed his identity.

Night Owl will be played by Patrick Wilson.

Ozymandias:
The son of rich immigrant parents, Adrian Veidt was found to be incredibly intelligent at a young age. After his parents and his teachers became suspicious of his grades, he successfully hid his intelligence by deliberately achieving average grades. After his parents’ deaths, he inherited their substantial fortune at age 17, but chose to give it all to charity. Veidt then embarked on a vision quest, following the route of Alexander the Great - a childhood idol - throughout the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and ancient Persia.

It was during this journey that he consumed a ball of hashish and decided to become a superhero. Returning to America, he named himself “Ozymandias” and became a costumed vigilante, focusing particularly on organized crime and earning a reputation as “the smartest man on the planet.” However, his own cases robbed him of the idealistic belief that battling crime would truly lessen evil and suffering in the world. This was brought to a head when an abortive attempt to organize a new superhero team was disrupted by the Comedian, who noted in his brutally apt way exactly how petty the doings of the costumed heroes were in a world where the threat of nuclear war hung overhead, and how powerless they were to stop it. Veidt was inspired to do just that.

Ozymandias will be played by Matthew Goode

The Silk Spectre:
Laurie Juspeczyk is liberal-thinking and a “modern” woman. She is vocal in her feminist and humanitarian concerns and is quite a conditioned fighter, and at the start of the story is shown to have a strained relationship with her mother.
Laurie met and became involved with Doctor Manhattan, something her mother did not approve of, likening Laurie’s relationship with Manhattan to being the equivalent of sleeping with an H-bomb. Drawn to him from the moment she first saw him, Laurie worked with Doctor Manhattan in some of his various domestic assignments, including the suppression of riots during the police strike of 1977. Never exactly happy being a vigilante and not happy with the government taking advantage with her relationship with the superhuman Manhattan, Laurie was more than pleased to quit being a superhero when the Keene Act of 1977 forced all but government-sponsored superheroes to retire.

The Silk Spectre will be played by Malin Akerman.

Dr. Manhattan:
Jon Osterman attends Princeton University from 1948-58 and graduates with a Ph.D. in atomic physics. In 1959, he moves to a research base at Gila Flats, where experiments are being performed concerning the ‘intrinsic fields’ of physical objects which, if tampered with, result in their disintegration. Here he meets Janey Slater, a fellow researcher; they are eventually to become lovers.

During a trip to New Jersey in July 1959, Jon and Janey visit an amusement park. There Janey’s watchband breaks, and the watch is damaged when a fat man steps on it. Jon decides that he can repair the watch, and tells Janey so. That night they sleep together.

One month later, in August, 1959, Jon goes to give Janey the repaired watch, only to discover he has left it in his lab coat, which is inside the intrinsic field experiment test chamber. While Jon is inside the test chamber retrieving his coat the door closes, automatically locking as a safety feature. Unable to open the door or override the countdown, Osterman’s colleagues - save for Janey, who cannot bear to see the last moment and flees the room - can only watch, horrified, as the countdown for the current experiment shortly reaches zero, and Jon has his ‘intrinsic field’ removed. Bathed in light, he is torn to pieces from the force of the generator, instantly vaporized and declared dead.

Dr. Manhattan will be played by Billy Crudup.

Rorschach:
His real name is Walter Joseph Kovacs, born March 21, 1940. His mother, a prostitute who resented his interference in her business, abused him viciously. At age 10, he was cruelly abused by two bullies and attacked them, partially blinding one with the bully’s own lit cigarette, and became a ward of the state, sent to the Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children (a homage to Charlton Comics). In high school, he excelled in religious education and literature, as well as in boxing and gymnastics, and also wrote an essay in which he praised President Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, asserting that the bombs helped save lives by stopping the war.

During those high school years at age 16, Walter was informed of his mother’s gruesome murder; her pimp force-fed her a bottle of Drano until she died in agony. Walter’s only reaction consisted of a single word: “Good.”

Reaching maturity, in 1956 at age 16 he found work as an unskilled garment worker; noting later to a prison psychiatrist “Job bearable but unpleasant. Had to handle female clothing”. Working in this capacity, in 1962 he grew fascinated by a new fabric made possible through technologies developed by Doctor Manhattan, containing viscous fluids between two layers of latex. Two liquids, one black and one white, continually shifted in response to heat and pressure, forming symmetrical patterns like a Rorschach inkblot test while never mixing to produce a grey colour. Kovacs learned of the fabric when a young woman chose not to buy a dress which she had ordered made from it; subsequently Kovacs took the dress home and experimented with the fabric. He learned to cut the fabric and maintain the seal using heated scissors.

Two years later, when Kitty Genovese (both in real life and in Watchmen) was brutally murdered in front of a building full of tenants who didn’t bother to help her, Kovacs decided that she had been the woman who had ordered the dress (”Young. Pretty. Italian name. I’m sure it was her”). Kovacs cut up the dress, making it into a mask and becoming Rorschach (taking his name from the test) to avenge the powerless victims of crime.

Rorschach will be played by Jackie Earle Haley.

Shooting starts this fall in Vancouver. Zack Snyder will be employing many of the filming techniques he used for his boxoffice success 300.

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