Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW
Oliver Queen is once again a free man. After leaving prison at the end of the last episode, he’s also been reunited with his wife, Felicity, and his best friend, John Diggle. Now Oliver has to settle back into his old life post-prison and try to get back to some semblance of normal, even though everyone now knows about his secret identity. During a recent visit to the set of ARROW in Vancouver, star Stephen Amell spoke to us about what’s next for Oliver.
- Giving Proper Weight to His Prison Experience. “I spent a lot of time talking with [showrunner] Beth [Schwartz] about Oliver when he gets out because I felt like in the first episode this year, we were really trying to charge ahead with a lot of cool new ideas, but it didn’t necessarily lend the proper weight to what happened at the end of season six in an episode that’s titled “Life Sentence.” In the first episode of Season 7, [the show] focused a lot on Oliver focusing on good behaviors so that he could get released, and I was like, well, I mean, one way or the other, he’s been in there for five, seven months, whatever the case may be. He’s got at least 14 or 15 [years] to go if he has good behavior. So we changed the focus a little bit. Same thing happened when I read Episode 8. I know they wanted Oliver back in the world, and he is and in a new and exciting way. Concurrently, it felt like we were treating my experience at Slabside like I spent a night in county jail. In actuality, even for Oliver, it was a pretty horrific experience. So I did want a change in him. I wanted a change in him in the way that he interacts with people, with the public, and even so far as his wardrobe. I went to Maya, and I’m like, ‘Oliver’s in his mid-30s, he’s a former politician. I want him to dress a little bit more like he used to dress for Sunday brunch at the Queen mansion.’ WASPy’s the wrong word, but it’s not totally the wrong word. But that’s not what we were going for. In the first episode that I’m out, we had him going to a gala, and I was in sort of the same suit that I would wear as the mayor. I didn’t like that. So we pushed that in a different direction, and part of the fun of this year is I’ve pitched a bunch of stuff, and not the opening scene of Episode 8, but the first time that you see Oliver, we came up with a really interesting way I think of showing what prison life did to him without really bashing people over the head with it.”
- Meeting the New Greem Arrow. Now that he’s not the protector fo the city any longer, how will Oliver feel? Amell said that “he runs into the new Green Arrow, or runs into the new Green Arrow’s exploits pretty quickly. But coming out of prison, he gets asked that specific question very early on: ‘What are you going to do?’ and he says, ‘I’m going to try and do what you guys did, which is just find a different way to help the city.’ We come up with that idea pretty quickly, but I think one of the fun things is it’s not Oliver who comes up with it.”
ARROW airs on Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.