Seth Rogen Tweets First Look At Preacher

Seth Rogen's Twitter feed is reflecting an understandable level of excitement that AMC's Preacher pilot is finally underway. Hot on the heels of his snap of the first clapperboard, Rogen has released a shot from the production itself, presenting Dominic Cooper sharing a quiet moment with Ian Colletti. Although you might want to crank up your computer's brightness settings to actually see that...

As a first look, it's a pretty deliberate tease, showing us little but the hairstyles of Cooper's Jesse Custer and Colletti's Arseface (the figure in the background appears to be Rogen's partner in crime Evan Goldberg). What's perhaps most significant is the decoration of Arseface's bedroom - if that's where we are. The self-inflicted facial shotgun injury that gives the character his name is, in Garth Ennis' Vertigo comics, prompted by the suicide of Kurt Cobain. But there's no sign of any Nirvana fandom for the Colletti version. Looks like he's a present-day kid who prefers Jack White.

Preacher, if you're unaware, is an extremely violent and extremely funny 75-issue comics odyssey following the Reverend Jesse Custer (who, possessed by the godlike offspring of an angel and a demon, has some rather special abilities), his ass-kicking girlfriend Tulip and their amoral vampire compadre Cassidy, on the trail of God, who has gone missing. Side-plots along the way involve the keepers of Christ's bloodline (in the form of a "special" inbred boy whose vocabulary consists solely of the word "humperdido"); meat fetishists; military fascists; necromantics; nuclear weapons; John Wayne; and Bill Hicks. And that's not the half of it.

Quite how much of that will make its way to television remains to be seen. "We love most of the main cornerstones of the comic," Rogen recently explained, "but we’re trying to make it that even if you’ve read the comic you should not know exactly what to expect from the TV show. We’ve come up with a lot of incredibly crazy ideas. It’s a fun thing to riff on and talk about..."

Cooper, as we said, is Custer, with Ruth Negga as Tulip, Joseph Gilgun as Cassidy and Elizabeth Perkins as the scheming Vyla Quinncannon. Rogen and Goldberg are directing; Breaking Bad veteran Sam Catlin wrote the screenplay; and assuming the show wins a series order, it’ll likely start screening either later this year or in 2016.