It’s impossible to imagine Peacemaker without any member of its ensemble, but Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante is a particularly important fixture of the series. In any other actor’s hands, the character would be little more than a Deadpool rip-off: the masked mercenaries share a lot of the same ideas about friendship and... well, murdering their targets. But Stroma brings a sense of, dare we say, innocence to his portrayal of Vigilante. He’s a hilarious foil to John Cena’s world-weary reformed douchebag, Peacemaker — but according to Stroma, that dynamic was almost completely different. That’s because a different actor originally had the Vigilante mantle, before Peacemaker creator and DC boss James Gunn decided to recast the role.
“There was another actor who played the role for the first, I think, five of the eight episodes,” Stroma recently told The Hollywood Reporter. That actor was Chris Conrad, who may be best known for his role in Young Hercules or Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
