If HBO's "Watchmen" has even one hater, it's the original comic's creator, Alan Moore. Three years after the TV series debuted, the English writer said he rejected the Emmy-winning series as his own.
"I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I've heard of them, it would be enormously punishing," he said in a new GQ interview published Tuesday. "It would be torturous, and for no very good reason."
Before "Watchmen" debuted in 2019, Moore said he received a "powder blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol" (inspired by his character Doctor Manhattan) and a letter from the showrunner. (Moore didn't name him, but Damon Lindelof was the showrunner.)
Moore said the letter — which began, "Dr. Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen" — was full of "neurotic rambling."
In turn, he sent the showrunner a "hostile reply."
"I said, 'Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don't want anything to do with you or your show. Please don't bother me again,'" he told GQ.
The "V for Vendetta" creator, 68, also said he had previously told Warner Bros. and its employees to leave him alone, that he had "disowned the work in question" because the film and comics industries "have created things that had nothing to do with my work."
The acclaimed 2019 series starred Regina King as Tulsa, Oklahoma, police detective Angela Abar and touched on sociopolitical issues including racism, white supremacy and police brutality against African Americans.
Despite Moore's reaction, "Watchmen" was a success for HBO, setting ratings records and taking home a slew of awards at the 2020 Emmys, including the limited-series prize. But even the accolades for the TV adaptation bothered Moore.
"When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, 'Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?,'" he added. "They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism. Did they not understand Watchmen?"
Claiming that the series, and other adaptations, have drifted far from his original intentions, Moore said he feels "less than fond of these works."
"They mean a bit less in my heart," he said.
Moore's distaste for screen projects, however, isn't new. Nearly a decade before the HBO series, Warner Bros. released the "Watchmen" film in 2009, and he wasn't a fan of that either.
"Will the film even be coming out? There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic. Perhaps it's been cursed from afar, from England," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2008. "And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come."
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