Confirmed: Brandon Routh’s Arrow Character Was Originally Ted Kord

Speaking to the Showrunner Whisperer podcast, Marc Guggenheim has confirmed that yes, Brandon Routh was originally going to play Ted Kord rather than Ray Palmer when he came to Arrow. Both characters are major players in the DC universe, but Ted Kord was unavailable to the show for Arrow Season 4.

In the comics from DC, Ted Kord was the longtime Blue Beetle before Jaime Reyes, an industrialist with a Bug ship and more. The Ted Kord version of the character was co-created by Spider-Man’s Steve Ditko! When the Ted character was tied up in another project that did not happen, DC offered the Arrow producers Ray Palmer, aka the Atom, instead.

“That was the original game plan,” Guggenheim said, referring to the hope that Brandon Routh would be Ted Kord. He did, however, praise DC for how the situation was handles. “DC was really great to work with. They said yes far more times than they said no. And when they said no, they always had good reasons. And when they said no, it always followed very quickly with ‘but how about this’ which was wonderful,” he recalled. “I think it’s also important to remember that when DC signed on to this show, they didn’t know that we were going to be going to so many corners of the DC Universe and coming to them, asking them for this character and that character. They rolled with the punches, I think, extraordinary well.”

Sure enough, if you look at our GreenArrowTV posts from years ago, you’ll see that yes, we did indeed speculate that Ted Kord was being cast for Season 3.

There was only one time that character limitations bothered Guggenheim, and he was done with showrunning at that point: When JJ Abrams had a Constantine project in the works, the character was no longer available to DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The show kept actor Matt Ryan but had him play a new character instead.

You can watch the interview below: