Tapping the talents of Dominic Cooper, Joseph Gilgun, Ruth Negga, Sam Catlin, and Garth Ennis was a good start. So was keeping it funny.
People have been trying to make Preacher work on television or the movies since the first issues were published in 1995. The list of people who attempted to bring the profane, disturbing, thrilling, and hilarious series to screens reads like a timeline of filmmakers who were hot between the mid-90s and the late 00s. It includes folks like Kevin Smith, Tank Girl director Rachel Talalay, Daredevil director Mark Steven Johnson, The Whole Ten Yards director Howard Deutch, and Sam Mendes. But by 2009, the project was dead and buried—after HBO declared it “too dark and too violent and too controversial,” according to Johnson.