‘The Flash’: Stephen Amell On Returning As The Green Arrow To Send Off The Arrowverse – Q&A
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details for this week’s episode of The CW’s The Flash.
Barry enlisted the help of an old friend to save the day on Wednesday’s episode of The Flash.
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The episode starts out on a positive note when Team Flash throws a surprise birthday party for Barry, but things go terribly awry when Ramsey Rosso crashes the festivities. After Ramsey renders the rest of Team Flash incapacitated, Barry thinks he’s alone in the fight.
But, instead, he’s visited by Oliver Queen aka Green Arrow (Stephen Amell), who has been keeping tabs on the group since becoming the Spectre. He returns to Earth once more to help Barry stop Ramsey (of course, donning the iconic Green Arrow suit).
Below, Amell chats with Deadline about returning to the Arrowverse for its swan song.
DEADLINE: How were you pitched on Oliver/Green Arrow returning for this episode of The Flash?
STEPHEN AMELL: Well, Greg Berlanti called me up, and he and I had more of a general conversation. He basically said, ‘It’s the last season of The Flash, and you’re one of the people that was responsible for the show being there in the first place. So would you like to come back?’ And I said, ‘Greg, I can’t believe I’m actually gonna say this because it sounds so cliche, but it really depends on what the story is.’ Greg said, ‘Okay, well, in that case, let’s get you on the phone with Eric Wallace.’ He’s the showrunner on The Flash, and I really liked what he had to pitch. I just thought it would be a little cliche if Oliver was back for the actual series finale, just because I wanted to make sure that the focus of that episode was not on the character returning and more on that show ending…I thought the fact that it was a quote unquote normal episode within the framework of the show was really exciting.
DEADLINE: Did you work at all with Eric to figure out how to make Oliver’s return not feel forced, or was the storyline already entirely laid out?
AMELL: I wanted to make sure that we alluded to the fact that Oliver went away, but then we have this sort of mythical version of him as the Spectre that I think we kind of all understood just exists up there in the multiverse somewhere, basically. But the thing that I liked with Eric is I let him figure out the logistics of how this all worked with the multiverse and the Spectre and coming back from the dead — because, believe it or not, the people who write shows in the Arrowverse do have a little bit of experience with people coming back from the dead. So, we wanted to come up with a cool idea that honored the story and it made sure that we honored everything that we did on Arrow. If I was going to come back, I wanted to come back and I wanted to be the Green Arrow.
DEADLINE: So let’s talk about the story then. Why do you think Oliver was the right person to help Barry through this moment?
AMELL: I mean, he met him at a really interesting point. He met him at the start of his journey. So I think that whenever the two of them talk, there’s always a certain thing that Barry’s gonna expect from Oliver and there’s always something that Oliver expects from Barry. I think in Oliver’s case, he enjoys the levity of Barry and I would think that in Barry’s case, he just enjoys the mentorship of Oliver. So it’s nice. I always felt like the scenes between Grant and myself, there was just always this nice bit of levity. I don’t know if he always got to do something unique as Barry with Oliver, but I thought that Oliver always got to do something unique with Barry.
DEADLINE: How did you feel stepping back on set as the Green Arrow?
AMELL: All of it felt very, very oddly familiar. I know that there were a lot of people that worked on The Flash, but more on the crew side, that were very excited for me to come back because a lot of them were on Arrow. Danielle Panabaker directed the episode and was really excited. She and I got to meet up over the Christmas break while she was prepping and chat about the scripts and stuff like that. So overall, the experience was just, it was really lovely. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.
DEADLINE: I’m sure some fans may have been hoping for an Olicity reunion. Do you think that Oliver’s explanation for not seeing Felicity while he was back means that he and Felicity’s story, at least in that timeline, had ended?
AMELL: I actually didn’t really view it that way. I viewed it more that he was saying that, you know, wherever they are, that they’re good — which I thought honored what we did in the last episode of Arrow.
DEADLINE: You said goodbye to the Arrowverse on a day to day basis a bit ago, but does it feel different now that the franchise is ending altogether?
AMELL: I think I moved away from it at the right time to clear the stage and let everyone else finish up, but I think that it’s finishing at a nice time. I think that things breaking up because of the pandemic and the changing shooting [schedule] and all of that stuff is a little frustrating, but that was the case for everybody. It’s been an absolutely amazing run in terms of an interconnected universe of superheroes on television. Hopefully when they go back and they write the book about it, they say we stuck the landing.
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