That trust extended to casting. Daniel Craig, Jude Law, and Sigourney Weaver were said to be interested in or attached to the Greengrass production, but Snyder felt celebrity would detract from Watchmen's substance. There's barely a brand-name star among his cast, and none were Watchmen fans when they were hired. Patrick Wilson (Angels in America) came aboard first and immediately started packing on weight to play the potbellied, middle-aged Nite Owl. Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) campaigned for the role of Rorschach — the comic's most popular character, despite his sociopathic, sadistic vigilantism — by recruiting 14 friends to help produce a video of himself performing sequences from the comic book. ''It was a little labor of love, man,'' he says. ''Kind of cheesy, but for an audition piece, it sufficed.''
When the six-month shoot commenced in Vancouver last summer, some of the actors struggled with fleshing out their complex, often corrupt characters. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (TV's Supernatural), who plays the Comedian, must carry out repellent acts of violence, but still manage to make the audience care about his death — and his big secrets. ''Some of the things this guy does, you can't make excuses for, even as an actor,'' Morgan says. ''Your instinct is to just play the guy as a bastard, but you can't.'' For Billy Crudup (Jesus' Son), the challenges were both physical and mental. His CG-rendered Dr. Manhattan is bald, blue, and often buck naked. Not only did he have to play an omniscient embodiment of quantum physics, but he had to do it wearing a white motion-capture suit blinged with tiny blue lights, his face covered with 140 black dots. ''It's really hard to feel like the master of all matter when the other actor can do little more than laugh in your face,'' Crudup says. ''I had to constantly reference the picture of the character, because if I caught the slightest glimpse of myself in any reflective surface, the illusion was crushed.''
NEXT PAGE: ''The challenge is to make a movie that can satisfy the fan but engage the typical moviegoer. I think that's how Zack feels too.''
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