SDCC Video: Stephen Amell On Arrow Season 3, Olicity, The Baby & More

It’s time for another Arrow video from Comic-Con, this time our full sit-down with Stephen Amell at the Arrow press room roundtable.

In the video, Stephen begins by talking about the show’s many flashbacks, and how Hong Kong will definitely change things. “It’s nice to throw people a little bit of a curveball with respect to the flashbacks,” he says. “Because again, like the producers said on the panel, it was like ‘oh. New season. Island. New bad guys.’ I like that in the flashbacks, if you think about it, at about the midway point of this year, we will be hitting the midway point of Oliver’s five-year journey. When I go for runs, I like to do out and back runs, because if I go for 30 minute feel like once we hit the down side of the hill in the flashbacks, then it will keep getting cooler.”

These flashbacks will feature some familiar faces. “There are a couple of characters that we’ve met through our first two seasons, where I have purposefully played it as though we may have met before. It’s not just Amanda Waller. There are characters that are going to come in – and we are also using the flashbacks – and I think this is really cool, I love this stuff – we’re using the flashbacks to explain things that happened in previous seasons. Like the whole ‘Eddie Fyers wants to shoot down an airliner?’ Why? Answers forthcoming,” he teases. In the video, Stephen also brings up the notion that actress Devon Aoki – who plays Tatsu/Katana in the flashbacks – is mentioned in a Season 1 episode featuring her brother, Steve Aoki.

Stephen promises that characters like Laurel are still “really involved” in Season 3, but says there is only one lady in Oliver’s eyes right now. “Oliver has one woman this year. That woman is Felicity,” he says. “Some of the stuff that we’re doing with the premiere, regardless of if that means Felicity are going to be together, if I meant what I said in the finale… we talk about some pretty important stuff in the premiere, and if Oliver were to have a fling, it would undermine some of that. So I think that the cavalcade of women is going to slow down or stop.” Is Felicity the end game? “Who’s to say?” Stephen teases.

Also in the video: Thea will be “handed the car keys for a few episodes this year,” Stephen discusses Oliver’s financial situation, and we ask whether or not we’ll be seeing Susanna Thompson (Moira) in flashbacks. We also asked about the storyline involving Oliver having a child, which was revealed in “Seeing Red” last year. Will it be revisited?

“Probably. When you see it revisited – if you see it revisited, this season or next – just remember that the way that they’re going to reintroduce it is an idea that I had,” Amell reveals. “I’m literally sitting in the writing room, and I’m like ‘Guys? You know what would be cool?’ And they hear my idea, and they go ‘That’s an amazing idea.’ Two weeks later, Marc Guggenheim is up at set and we’re filming our season finale, and he comes up to me and he goes ‘we have the best idea for the Oliver child storyline. He pitched my idea back to me. I let him pitch it, and I said ‘Marc, that was my idea’ and he was like ‘Oh!’ This year, during the premiere, Andrew Kreisberg comes over and he also pitched that idea to me. So, I’m excited. That’s a cool dynamic, and I hope it will be explored. The girl that plays my baby mama is a wonderful actor… it’s weird, because she and Oliver had a relationship in the past, and I’ve literally never met her, because I wasn’t there the day that she shot.”

You can watch the full interview video below. Enjoy: