HBO’s Watchmen: The 5 Best Original Characters (& 5 Best Returning Characters)

When HBO announced a limited series adapted from Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen comics, fans assumed they were taking a second crack at translating the source material directly to the screen after Zack Snyder’s movie version got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. However, Damon Lindelof and co. actually cooked up a sequel to the comic book.

With both original characters and returning icons from the comics, Watchmen became one of HBO’s most popular and critically acclaimed shows in years. The show introduced some fascinating new characters to the world Moore created, and added to the stories of several of his own characters.

10 Original: Lady Trieu

Although she was initially shrouded in mystery, Lady Trieu was eventually revealed to be the main antagonist of the series. In addition to being a villain to the heroes, she’s also a villain to the other villains.

Hong Chau gave a terrific performance in the role, getting the audience to second-guess her at every turn, while the twist that she’s Adrian Veidt’s daughter helped to tie all the story threads together.

9 Returning: Captain Metropolis

There are two versions of Captain Metropolis, one of the founding members of the Minutemen, in the 2019 Watchmen series. The actual character is played by Jake McDorman, while an in-universe version of him is played by Chris Whitley on the show-within-the-show American Hero Story.

Flashbacks reveal that after finding out the identity of Hooded Justice, Captain Metropolis encouraged him to join the team and the two began an affair.

8 Original: Judd Crawford

In the role of Tulsa police chief Judd Crawford, Don Johnson was set up as one of the main protagonists in the first episode of Watchmen. He was shown to be close friends with Angela Abar and seemed to be as desperate as her to bring down the Seventh Kavalry.

However, in the final moments of the episode, he’s hanged from a tree. The following episodes reveal that Crawford wasn’t the nice guy he seemed to be, but rather a famed white supremacist.

7 Returning: Adrian Veidt

Described as the smartest man in the world, Adrian Veidt was known as the superhero Ozymandias in the original Watchmen story. In the HBO series, he’s played by the great Jeremy Irons and he’s supposed to be dead when he’s actually living in a country manor with a full staff. These turn out to be clones and the manor turns out to be on Europa.

Veidt has a complicated backstory in the series, as he’s held responsible for the deaths of three million New Yorkers following an alien squid attack that he only launched to prevent a nuclear war from wiping out all life on Earth.

6 Original: Red Scare

Angela Abar isn’t the only Tulsa cop with a superhero alter ego in HBO’s Watchmen series. She works with Red Scare, a cop with a Russian accent who wears a red outfit.

The name and characterization call back to the Cold War tensions that had a huge influence on Alan Moore’s work on the original comic.

5 Returning: Silk Spectre II

There are two versions of Silk Spectre in the Watchmen universe: the Sally Jupiter version and her daughter, Laurie Juspeczyk. In the TV series, Laurie has given up being a vigilante and changed her name to Laurie Blake.

She’s played by Jean Smart and she’s now an FBI agent assigned to the Anti-Vigilante Task Force. She’s one of the fiercest new characters on the show.

4 Original: Looking Glass

Initially, as a mysterious, brooding vigilante who wears a mind-bending mask, Looking Glass seemed like the 2019 miniseries’ answer to Rorschach. However, Tim Blake Nelson rounded him out as his own character.

His reflective mask is symbolically fascinating and his uncanny ability to tell if people are lying makes him a true-to-life superhero, although he’s usually recruited by marketing firms to use that power to figure out which focus group members are fudging their answers to save face.

3 Returning: Hooded Justice

The true identity of Hooded Justice — the first masked vigilante who inspired the formation of the Minutemen — was never revealed in the comic book, although it was implied to be circus strongman Rolf Müller. In the HBO series, Hooded Justice is instead revealed to be Will Reeves, Angela Abar’s grandfather who survived the 1921 Tulsa race riot and became a cop working for racist superiors.

Struggling to get ahead as a Black police officer, Will decided to instead fight for justice by donning a mask and taking down the criminals himself, then promptly uncovered a KKK plot called “Cyclops.”

2 Original: Sister Night

The most intriguing new character added to the Watchmen universe by the HBO miniseries was without a doubt the lead protagonist, Angela Abar, a vigilante cop who wears a nun’s habit and goes by the alias Sister Night.

Regina King more than earned her Emmy win with a wholeheartedly committed performance that deftly carries audiences through the strangest corners of this world and the most shocking twists in the story.

1 Returning: Doctor Manhattan

In the first few episodes of Watchmen, audiences are led to believe that the character played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a regular guy named Cal who married Angela. However, it’s later revealed that Cal is just the form he took to hide his true identity as Doctor Manhattan from even himself.

“A God Walks Into Abar,” the penultimate episode of the series, details how Doctor Manhattan met Angela in a bar in Vietnam, they fell in love, and he ended up taking on Cal’s identity.

About The Author

Ben Sherlock
(3465 Articles Published)

Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, independent filmmaker, and Burt Reynolds enthusiast. He writes lists for Screen Rant and features and reviews for Game Rant. He’s currently in pre-production on his first feature (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop.

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