Peacemaker’s Secret Weapon Was Almost Completely Different
Before Freddie Stroma, Vigilante was played by a totally different actor.

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.
The deeper Gunn got into the first season of Peacemaker, the more he felt a disconnect of sorts with Conrad. In 2022, he told ScreenRant that Conrad is “an incredibly talented guy... but we were on different pages about certain things, and I don’t think he wanted to continue on the series in the long run.”
Stroma took over Vigilante halfway through filming Peacemaker Season 1.
So Gunn set out to recast Vigilante in a process that Stroma calls “a weird situation.”
“I was in an audition, and [they had] made up a different character’s name for the sides,” Stroma explained. “And then I had a phone call with James, and he was trying to figure out what was doable, whether we could do ADR lines over [the scene] if the mask is on.”
As Conrad had already filmed more than half of Peacemaker Season 1, finding an actor with a similar height and body type “was definitely a requirement.” Gunn was also keen to keep as much of Conrad’s original footage as possible, so Stroma recorded audio dialogue over already-edited scenes. In some shots of Peacemaker, it’s still Conrad in the Vigilante suit, just with Stroma’s voice matching his performance.
“I went into the studio and I did a kind of ADR and try and put my performance or spin on it with the already edited footage,” he explained. “I had to perform the scenes, but I also had to perform it exactly to [Conrad’s] movement. And, you know, you obviously [try to] hit certain words with the body language.”
Reshooting Season 1 after Conrad was “quite intimidating” for Stroma.
Vigilante wears a mask for much of the first half of Season 1, which likely allowed the Peacemaker team to rely solely on Stroma’s ADR dialogue. Once the character is unmasked at the end of Episode 4, Gunn and Stroma had at least two episodes to reshoot.
“I would go with a splinter unit, and James would join me, and we’d reshoot the scenes without the mask,” Stroma explains. “Nothing changed on the page; it was two actors playing the same role.”
Still, the actor admits to feeling a little intimidated about taking on the role. “To have a crew having to reshoot, looking at you, going, ‘Alright, come on. Do better.’ It’s quite intimidating.” Stroma did his best not to think about Conrad’s take on the character, focusing only on his performance — and the rest is history.
Watching the show now, there’s virtually no way of knowing that Vigilante was nearly played by a different actor entirely. It took a lot of work behind the scenes, but it obviously paid off, especially since it gave fans a new favorite in Stroma.