In Season 3, Oliver Queen’s alter ego, Arrow, will face Ra’s al Ghul as the Big Bad. But for fans and The CW, he’s already won.
Graphic by Alice Mongkongllite for BuzzFeed / Warner Bros. Television / The CW
On the Vancouver set of Arrow, during an uncharacteristically sweltering August day in the usually cool city, Stephen Amell was bewigged. The star of Arrow was shooting a scene set in Hong Kong, where Oliver landed in the Season 2 finale, finally sprung from the island where he had been captive in flashbacks during the show's first two seasons. As a present-day billionaire superhero, Oliver veers between his (green) Arrow costume and designer suits, with a cropped haircut that matches his grown-up rich-kid station (despite some current financial problems). In flashbacks, however, Ollie is often dirty, bedraggled, and shaggy. Amell apologized for his appearance, and told a story about going home in the middle of a workday — while still in flashback costume — to say hello to his wife and baby daughter, and how he ended up terrifying his child. In a flattened tone, Amell said, "I hate it."
Too bad. Because the nature of Arrow is that Amell, 33, plays multitudes. He is the Oliver Queen who is a Starling City socialite returned from the dead two years before; he is the Arrow, who was fueled by rage upon his return to the world, but now seeks justice and aspires to heroism; he is the Oliver of the flashbacks, who has had to transform from a hapless prisoner to a shrewd, hardened ass-kicker; and in wayback flashbacks, he's Ollie the playboy douche. And within all of those personas, Oliver is keeping secrets, calculating his future moves, and trying to remain a human being.
Andrew Kreisberg, who developed Arrow with Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, said to BuzzFeed News: "We always say, every week we're trying to make a movie. And that wouldn't work if we didn't have a movie star in the lead."
Season 3 of Arrow begins Oct. 8 on The CW. For its first two seasons, it has been the network's most-watched show, averaging 3.8 million viewers in Nielsen's Live + 7 ratings. On Tuesday night, relying on Arrow's strength and presumed audience desire, The CW launched a spinoff, The Flash , also based on a DC Comics property. The Flash, starring Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, was born out of an Arrow Season 2 arc; the two shows are set in different cities, but exist in the same universe, and will cross over. And even at this early stage, executives at DC, The CW, and Warner Bros. (the studio that produces the show), are eyeing a third character who could possibly lead another show. "There are discussions going on," said Mark Pedowitz, the president of The CW, in a recent telephone interview, "but I can't tell you what they are."
In addition to Arrow and The Flash, television currently has a number of comic-book-based shows — AMC's The Walking Dead, Fox's Gotham, ABC's Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and NBC's soon-to-premiere Constantine — but let's face it: It's a hard row to hoe. Especially when the genre gets further whittled to superhero TV. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. struggled to find itself creatively in its first season, and Gotham, three episodes in, is making those attempts now. The fanboy community, once won over, is among the most loyal pop culture consumers — but first you have to drag them, screaming, from throwing the project off a precipice of knee-jerk hate.
"When the project got announced, there was a lot of cynicism we were met with online — which, by the way, I totally get," Guggenheim said. "Green Arrow is a character that hasn't always had the most success in comic book form. So the idea of bringing him to a TV show is really hard."
Arrow, as first imagined by Berlanti — the television writer/producer behind Everwood and Brothers & Sisters, among many others — when he got an overall deal with Warner Bros. three years ago and they asked him whether he was interested in developing any DC properties, is an origins story. The show is set to run for five seasons, each flashing back to a year of Oliver's captivity. By the end of the show, Oliver will have evolved from the Hood to the Vigilante to the Arrow — to Green Arrow.
Stephen Amell in the Season 3 premiere.
Cate Cameron/The CW
Like Oliver Queen, Arrow has its own origins story. Berlanti said that when asked about doing a superhero show, "I was a little bit hesitant." But when he thought about the hero's journey of Green Arrow, and thought about making it "real, and grounded in reality," he got excited. Berlanti enlisted Guggenheim, a frequent collaborator, and then Kreisberg, who had worked with both of them on the short-lived Eli Stone and had genre credits ranging from Vampire Diaries to Fringe. (It has likely helped that all three of them are comic book devotees — Guggenheim is writing the female-centric X-Men title, and co-writes the Arrow tie-ins. "The fans can smell a fraud," said Guggenheim.)
None of this would matter, though, if they didn't find the right Oliver Queen. The pilot's casting director told the producers that Stephen Amell, a Toronto-born actor who had done arcs on The Vampire Diaries, HBO's Hung, and ABC's Private Practice, was coming in — and they had to decide on him right away.
"Stephen was the very first person to come in and audition for any role," said Guggenheim. "Our casting director David Rapaport said, 'He will be off the market on Friday.' We were, like, 'You've got to be kidding me, the very first person coming in?'"
It ended up not being a problem. Guggenheim said, "I saved the audition on my computer, thinking, well, even if we don't get to cast him, I want to have this guy's audition. Because he's going to be a big star one day."
Pedowitz was already a fan from his previous job running ABC Studios, the producers of Private Practice. "He's a man! He's a man. He was not a, um —" Pedowitz paused to try to describe what he meant. "He was the opposite in what we were seeing in a lot of superheroes at that point. Or heroes in that time. He played a man. He acted like a man."
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