There’s a certain throwback charm to Vincent D’Onofrio’s Twitter account, harkening back to an era when the Elon Musk-owned social media site was less absolutely rampant with virulent hate being screamed at maximum volume (and, also, less rampant with Elon Musk). Clicking through his missives and mentions is like a window back into an era where social media was mostly about famous people telling you things like what they had for lunch, or just saying hey to people asking for shout-outs or whatever. For one thing—and we admit, this can be tricky to parse—the man seems to mostly write it himself. (That, or he’s got PR people who are very good at replicating the terse writing style of a busy person who is not a natural online publicist.) For another, when D’Onofrio does post, a fair amount of it is just about how he should be Swamp Thing, please.
The Daredevil: Born Again actor has been beating this particular, rather murky drum for about a year at this point, actually: Back at Dragon Con last year, he apparently got asked about his comic book heroes and dream roles, and didn’t beat around the giant, ambulatory bush: “I would really like to play Swamp Thing. I would fucking kill it,” he told the crowd. Since then, he’s popped up with some regularity on social media to reiterate this idea, giving the answer consistently when asked about his ideal future parts, and recently responding to a random 2,000-follower fan account’s “Should Vincent D’onofrio Play Swamp Thing In James Gunn’s #DCU ?” with a simple “Yes he should.” Vincent D’Onofrio may be a professional actor of significant caliber, but it would be hard to fake this level of apparently massive enthusiasm for being a big moldy plant man for this long.
As it happens, there is allegedly a Swamp Thing movie in the works right now: James Gunn and Peter Safran announced it as part of the initial rollout of their new DC Universe, with Logan‘s James Mangold tapped to both write and direct. That being said, the project has gotten way less attention than some other DCU projects in the years since. (We suspect that the Mike Flanagan-backed Clayface, which will incorporate horror elements into the superhero universe in ways that sound a bit like what Mangold floated in interviews, has taken up some of its oxygen.) But also, c’mon: Why not cast Vincent D’Onofrio as Swamp Thing? He really wants it! He’s great at glowering and at yelling! It can’t go any worse than the Swamp Thing TV show that died a quick and ignoble death back in 2019! Let the man be Swamp Thing!
