Those of you up on your comic book history and even those of you who watch Cartoon Network's Young Justice know that Roy Harper has an interesting development arc. In the comics, Roy transitions from Speedy, to Red Arrow and eventually to Arsenal and even has a daughter named Lian with the sometimes-villainess Cheshire. Below, Arrow executive producer Andrew Kreisberg fields a few questions from Mingle Media TV Network about whether we'll be seeing any of these plotlines develop for Colton Haynes on the show.
The interview opens up with the loaded question of when is Roy's arm getting blown off?
AJ Kreisberg:"[laughs] We talk about that a lot, like, 'What should we do with that?' Roy is another example of [the fact that] we never set out to just grab from the comic books and do something. We had felt that in Thea, especially in the first half of the season, we had done a lot with her being the bratty sister and her sort of being trapped in the house with mom and we really wanted to get her out of there and we thought, 'Oh, since she's going to work at CNRI, maybe she meets this kid who's down on his luck and he's sort of a criminal, and I can't remember which of us said that it should be Roy Harper.' So we sort of backed into it. Our Roy Harper is not quite the Roy Harper everyone knows from the comic books. When we meet him, he's really a gangbanger, he's a thug and a criminal. Even though deep down he's got potential, what you'll be seeing over the back half of this season is that he has a very profound interaction with The Arrow that will impact his life choices moving forward and will impact his relationship with Thea.
The followup question is about auxiliary characters that surround Roy, like Cheshire and Lian.
Kreisberg: "Not yet, I think we're far away from that but this is definitely Roy Harper. So for better or worse, how we move forward with that character will please the fans of the character but for the people who don't know the source material, he's just a new and exciting character that's just entered the Arrowverse.
Next question is about Manu Bennett's Slade Wilson aka Deathstroke the Terminator.
Well, it's funny because I'm a huge fan of Spartacus and truth be told, Manu was hired because we knew he was a badass and we needed someone to play Deathstroke who is the biggest badass in the DC Universe. But Manu himself is such a sweet, funny guy. That's really changed our conception of the character and allowed us to develop this fun, brotherly banter with Oliver and Slade on the island. It's really become much more of a Han Solo, Luke Skywalker relationship than what we were actually envisioning. It's a great example of someone being hired and providing far more than what any of us were expecting. Writing Slade right now, he's my new favorite character.
New episodes of Arrow resume March 20th at 8pm PST/EST on The CW.
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Running Time: 60 min
Release Date: October 10, 2012
MPAA Rating: Tv-14
Starring: Katie Cassidy, Stephen Amell, David Ramsey, Byron Mann, Colin Donnell, Colin Salmon, Paul Blackthorne, Emily Bett Rickards, John Barrowman, Roger R. Cross and Willa Holland
Directed by: David Nutter (pilot)
Written by: Greg Berlanti (story/writer), Marc Guggenheim (story/writer), Andrew Kreisberg (writer), George Papp (character) and Mort Weisinger (character)