On ‘Lanterns,’ the Costumes Have a Bird’s-Eye View of the Characters

Costume designer Cynthia Ann Summers tells IndieWire about taking inspiration from Tippi Hedren and Anthony Bourdain for HBO's latest superpowered mystery series.

The only power in the Universe stronger than the Lantern Corps might be HBO’s NDAs, so costume designer Cynthia Ann Summers cannot reveal the exact green of the Green Lantern suit. But the nice thing about HBO’s latest superpowered mystery series, “Lanterns,” is that the show spends most of its time in contemporary clothing. Much like a Manhunter, the true import of the costumes on “Lanterns” hides in plain sight.

Summers, who dove headfirst into the comics after coming aboard the show, didn’t just want to create a “Yellowstone” or “True Detective” retread for the world around Rushville, the vague sense that something is rotten in the State of Nebraska. The costume designer wanted to subtly connect or contrast the characters, even across space and time. 

This started for Summers with the reluctant situationship between current Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and potential replacement Lantern John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) — it was important to Summers to put them in different color temperatures (Hal runs warmer and John cooler, to the surprise of no one), to give Hal a baggier silhouette while keeping John sharp and svelte. But the connective tissue stitched into the costumes is maybe best exemplified in how the Stewart family relates to Laura Linney’s sublimely strange alien, Lianna. 

“The idea was that she is trying to manifest into how [Lianna] thinks an Earthly woman looks, but she’s sort of misstepped her time zone,” Summers told IndieWire. “So we leaned into really beautiful silhouettes from the sort of late ‘50s. Tippi Hedren in ‘The Birds’ was a big reference for me, clearly, in one of her outfits. Pencil skirt with a swing coat kind of a thing. Always a scarf, always gloves.” 

Linney’s out-of-step costumes feel even more so in Episode 3, “OutKast”, where she interacts with John and his mother Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) across the decades of John’s intense upbringing. The fact that Linney’s outfits change can help show the passage of time — as in the sequence where she orders John to stay put and then doesn’t come back until the next day — but the fact that her style is still placidly Hitchcockian throughout only makes her look increasingly strange the closer we get to the present day.

But she’s always connected to John. “Every outfit she had on, somewhere in that outfit, whether it was in the scarf or a pin, there was a reference to a bird. The bird connects her with Bernadette and with John. That was intentional,” Summers said. Whether adding a feather to her wardrobe or a bird hidden inside the print of a dress, Lianna’s interest in John is always present in her clothes.

Hal’s disinterest in John is also always present. One of the very first images that Summers found to put on her moodboard for Earth’s most cantankerous member of the Lantern Corps featured Anthony Bourdain. “He’s sitting in some kind of cantina somewhere, and he’s just relaxed in the chair with his arm back and his other arm with a beer on the table and his legs crossed, and he’s wearing exactly what Hal is wearing for his hero 2016 look,” Summers said. “There was something about [Bourdain’s gray hair, his demeanor, his take on the world, and his sad ending. It just rang true to me that that was Hal.”

The rakish, confident, but a hint-of-despair attitude that Summers found in that image, and in the clothes she selected for Hal, also rang true to Kyle Chandler. It doesn’t always work out that a costume designer gets a lot of time with their leads during prep, but both Chandler and Pierre happened to be in L.A. while Summers was pulling looks, and they arranged a meeting and a sort of impromptu, pre-fitting, mostly to share ideas. 

“ It’s an incredible relationship that the two of them have, the love/hate thing, the sort of admiration for each other and the disdain for each other at the same time, and the camaraderie and the fear and the everything,” Summers said. “And we found our pieces actually in that pre-fitting. That’s where we found [Hal’s] look. It was magic.”

The most magic piece of costuming, however, might be the cowboy hats. Initially, Summers explored a more ballcap, heartland look for the denizens of Rushville, particularly our “weenie” rancher bigwig Mason (Garret Dillahunt) and our clever, skeptical Sheriff Kerry (Kelly Macdonald). But of course, Sunmers did have some more cowboy type duds on hand for the fittings, just to try them out. 

“We didn’t wanna do anything super ranchy. We were sort of dummying down the looks as far as we could go and still be believable,” Summers said. “And I was a bit sad about that, to be honest with you, because Garrett Dillahunt is so handsome, and he so can be a cowboy. And Kelly, being from Scotland, was so ready to wear some cowboy boots in town and so ready to do this whole thing.” 

Once the “Lanterns” team saw the pair doing the whole cowboy thing, the choice was already made. “We put the cowboy hat on and sent [the team] the photos and they were like, ‘Yeah, OK. It’s a cowboy hat show. And I think it just adds stature. A good cowboy hat just adds to what an actor can do. You can tip it. You can side eye under it. You can do all sorts of things.” 

Whether with cowboy hats or combat boots, part of Summers’ goal was providing the actors pieces that they could really act with, that could add texture to and even become part of a performance. When working with contemporary clothing, that ability to choose active pieces that feel real and speak to who the characters are is all the more important. Unlike big fantasy or period costume pieces, it’s a battle of inches. 

“In contemporary, it’s really all in the small details,” Summers said. “You can’t imagine putting anything on Aaron that’s kinda casual and hip. It just would never work. He’s close cut, very precisely cut.” 

Given that context, it was really rewarding for Summers to chart John’s growth across the show and across the life we see him live in flashback, and the potential future still ahead of him. “We had three generations of kids of each of the characters. We haven’t seen John’s grown up brothers yet but they’re pretty amazing when they come in,” Summers said. “And the 1980s clothes, we had a lot of fun with that for Jasmine and Jay Alphonse. What really great actors and what an amazing, important episode, I think. Episode 3.” 

Lucky for us there are more important tests for John, and more tells hidden in the costumes of “Lanterns,” ahead. 

”Lanterns” is now playing on HBO.