DCEU’s Most Wasted Star Wants TMNT: The Last Ronin Movie Role (& They’re Perfect)

A former DC star has a new goal: play Casey Jones in a new live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Elias Koteas played the hockey stick-wielding masked vigilante in the 1990 movie based on Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original comic books, which have since spawned The Last Ronin. Conceived as the “final story” of the heroes in a half shell — Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo — The Last Ronin is set decades into a possible apocalyptic future where Mikey, the lone surviving Turtle, must avenge his fallen brothers.

As 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles turns 35, Eastman revealed that Joe Manganiello — a noted comic book fan whose credits include his roles as Flash Thompson in Spider-Man and Slade Wilson in Justice League — has approached him about potentially playing Casey Jones in a decades-later sequel to the original movie.

“I first met him [when] he approached me online because he’s a huge Turtle fan, and he’s a huge fan of the Turtles role-playing games,” Eastman told PEOPLE. “So we visited a few times and we keep in touch … But when they talked about doing a new Turtles live-action movie, he said, ‘I want to be Casey Jones in the revision of that.’ He sent me a couple of pictures. And he would be [perfect] agewise. He’s perfect. He’d be perfect for it.”

Manganiello, 48, was slated to have a larger role as the masked mercenary Deathstroke in the DC Extended Universe. First appearing in the post-credits scene of 2017’s Justice League (a role the actor later reprised for Zack Snyder’s Justice League), Manganiello’s Deathstroke was to be the villain in Ben Affleck’s Batman movie that never materialized. But now that the DC continuity has been rebooted, Manganiello hopes to take on another iconic comic book character.

Eastman previously told ComicBook that the live-action adaptation of The Last Ronin in development at Paramount and Nickelodeon could potentially serve as a sequel to the ’90s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy.

“What I’ve been told in the discussions, as limited as they are, is that what they loved about Last Ronin — because Last Ronin, to me, was a love poem to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight,” Eastman said, referring to 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns, which took place a decade after an aging Batman retired from crime-fighting. “All things Batman exist in Dark Knight, but it was set in a universe just to the left [of canon]. So they didn’t have to play by all the lineage rules … they were able to tell a story all within itself.”

“With The Last Ronin, we took that same approach, but it leans heavily on the Mirage Universe,” Eastman added of the original run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. The Last Ronin teamed Mikey with Casey Marie Jones — the 16-year-old daughter of Casey Jones and April O’Neil — who followed in her father’s footsteps with Mikey as her sensei. (Issue #3 of the five-issue series revealed in a flashback that Casey died alongside Leo in an explosion triggered by the Turtles’ old enemy, Baxter Stockman.)

In the sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin II — Re-Evolution, co-written by Eastman and Tom Waltz, Casey Marie leads a resistance with her young pupils: Moja, Odyn, Uno, and Yi, the next generation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Last Ronin and The Last Ronin II: Re-Evolution are now available from IDW and wherever books are sold.