Bryan Fuller is no stranger to remixing and re-imagining established canon, as we’ll soon re-learn with Starz’s long-gestating adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Now, a new photo reveals a fresh addition to Shadow Moon’s opposing deities, as Corbin Bernsen takes a role as the unofficial God of Guns.

Per Entertainment Weekly, the former Psych star will play Vulcan, a character based on the Roman god of metalworking and volcanoes, and ergo a major figure in the country where explosive metalwork permeates almost every corner of political debate.

The character represents a new addition to Neil Gaiman’s original novel, one which the author himself had intended to write into an episode, though scheduling has since negated that possibility. Co-showrunner Michael Green nonetheless developed the character, explaining of his conception:

He’s a brand-new addition who came from an experience Neil had. He was going through a small town in Alabama where he saw a statue of Vulcan. It was a steel town and, as he told the story, there was a factory that had a series of accidents where people were killed on the job and they kept happening because an actuarial had done the numbers and realized that it was cheaper to pay out the damages to the families of people who lost people, rather than to shut down the factory long enough to repair, and that occurred to him as modern a definition of sacrifice as there might be.

What’s interesting about a god like Vulcan who has bound himself to guns is it’s an evolution of what he was to what he could be, and that’s finding a new place in a world that didn’t have a place for old gods. That comes with a series of compromises but also a series of benefits for him. To say that maybe you can find a new place in this country, that it doesn’t always have to be so hard, makes him an interesting person as someone with a long history with Mr. Wednesday.

For those unfamiliar with Sandman creator Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods follows ex-convict Shadow Moon, who partners up with mysterious con-man Mr. Wednesday (secretly a god himself), becoming embroiled in a battle between classic mythological gods who have fallen out of style, and the “new” American gods based on greed, technology and celebrity.

We’ll likely hear more official news soon, but watch the first American Gods trailer below.

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