Cayden James has positioned himself as a major villain this season on ARROW and Felicity can’t help but feel responsible for her part in unleashing his particular brand of evil on the world.
“I think she feels so guilty about Cadyen James resurfacing in her life a repercussion of a mistake that she has made once again,” Emily Bett Rickards (Felicity Smoak) explained. “I want to stay away from the word guilt, but I know that is there. I just feel like she [has] built up to this thing where she feels like it is her fault — like it is all of these faults that are falling on Felicity’s back. Now she has created more problems for the world in which they live. [And] the world [is] not only being localized to Star City.”
As for Cayden James’ real master plan, Rickards hinted that “If you think destroying the internet is a really big move, just think bigger.”
But Team Arrow can’t take on James as they would any other villain. Stephen Amell (Oliver Queen) explained that “He’s not physical. He’s intellectual. We wanted to create a new kind of villain. I cannot say enough about Michael Emerson. It is a stunning thing to share scenes with him, especially as someone that was a giant fan of LOST. We can’t just do the same thing [with Cayden James] that we did with Chase and just create a villain that’s ten steps ahead, so he’s unique in his own way. But the real uniqueness this year is the number of people that Team Arrow is up against. We have Cayden James and, theoretically, we have Vigilante in the mix. We have Richard Dragon. And we have Black Siren. And we have Anatoly. These are five extremely powerful, capable people on their own. So you put them all together, and it’s really something. I’m interested to see how that dynamic plays out because I don’t know what they’re going to get up to yet.”
Cayden James returns in the next new episode of ARROW, airing on November 23 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
