Taking aim
Stephen Amell brings Green Arrow to TV
When he learned he would be cast as playboy-billionaire-by-day, bow-and-arrow-wielding-vigilante-by-night Oliver Queen in the new, filmed-in-Vancouver superhero drama Arrow, Stephen Amell might well have thought to himself, “Pray God our aim is true and each arrow finds its mark.”
That may happen in comic-book fiction, but as Toronto native and former Rent-a-Goalie player Amell knows all too well, TV is a moving target. A lot of factors go into making a hit show, including luck, good fortune, a comfortable time period and a group of people — in front of the camera and behind — who know what they’re doing.
As Arrow, a high-octane action drama based on the DC Comics original Green Arrow, prepares for its North American debut on Wednesday, Amell knows that, even if the worst were to happen, Arrow can do no worse than one-for-four.
Arrow’s behind-thescenes brain trust includes Everwood and Brothers & Sisters creator Greg Berlanti, first-season Fringe writer Andrew Kreisberg and veteran Marvel Com- ics and DC Comics writer Marc Guggenheim.
The pilot episode was directed in Vancouver this past spring by David Nutter, a Los Angeles veteran who’s established a Directors Guild of America record for pilot episodes green-lighted to series: 17 for 18, starting with Space: Above and Beyond in 1995 and including such Vancouver-based series as Dark Angel, Millennium, Sleepwalkers, Supernatural and Smallville.
Amell’s fellow cast members include Katie Cassidy, daughter of ’70s teen heartthrob and The Partridge Family star David Cassidy, as Queen’s estranged girlfriend, and U.K. veteran Paul Blackthorne, last seen on the small screen as an ethically challenged filmmaker in the jungle thriller The River, as a detective-for-hire who doesn’t believe Queen’s billionaire-playboy cover story for a second.
Green Arrow was one of several comic-book characters to appear in Smallville, from 2006 to 2011, but Arrow’s producers elected not to use the same actor — Knoxville, Ill., native Justin Hartley — when deciding to go ahead with Arrow.
“We wanted to chart our own course, our own destiny,” Guggenheim explained earlier this summer, at a press gathering in Los Angeles.
“I don’t think we felt any desire or need to let the ground lie fallow, especially since this is such a different take.
“The audience these days is savvy enough to recognize there are different interpretations possible for any given character. Look at The Amazing Spider-Man. And that’s, what, just five years since the last SpiderMan movie. Your love for Michael Keaton doesn’t affect your love for Christian Bale, and your love for Christian Bale doesn’t necessarily affect your love for Adam West. There are always different iterations possible for a character. Look at James Bond, for example. No concerns there.”
Saying is one thing; doing is another. Casting the lead actor for a drama as narrowly focused as Arrow is often problematic and frustrating. A near miss might just as well miss by a mile. Amell hit the target right from the outset, though, Kreisberg said. Amell, fresh off a plane from Toronto, was one of the first actors to audition for the role.
“After he auditioned, everyone else just paled in comparison,” Kreisberg said. “Usually, when you go into the studio and the network, you go in with multiple choices. We didn’t do that. Every step of the way, it was Stephen, Stephen, Stephen. Not just physically but talent-wise, emotionally, you name it, he was always Oliver Queen to us.”
Amell always considered himself fit — fit enough to play hockey in Rent-a-Goalie, anyway. Even so, training for Arrow, with its “grant that my aim be steady, my aim be true and my feet swift” ethos kicked it up to a different level.
Before resuming filming the series in Vancouver at the summer’s end, Amell trained at the Tempest Freerunning Academy in Reseda, Calif. — the same sweat factory that trains the contenders for American Ninja Warrior, based on the Japanese competition series Sasuke.
“I had to exercise muscles I didn’t even know existed, let alone had used before,” Amell said, somewhat sheepishly. “My coach, Paul Darnell, was actually the double for Henry Cavill in Superman, and he had me doing things I never even considered initially.”
It wasn’t all fun and games, though.
“I had never picked a bow and arrow up before,” Amell said. “I have a wonderful coach, Patricia Gonsalves, and the first thing she did was show me a 45-minute video of all the ways archery has been done badly on television and in film, before teaching me how to aim. You know, the basics.
“Working with a bow and arrow is one of the most dangerous things that you can do on a film set. You can put blank bullets in a gun. With an arrow, you’re either dry-firing, or you make sure there’s nobody within 180 degrees of you when you’re shooting it.”
Physical action is one thing, acting another. Amell says one thing that appealed to him about Queen was the faces of his personality. There’s Queen the casual playboy; Queen the wounded hero; Queen the brooding Hamlet; Queen the lover; Queen the man of action, and so on.
“When I looked at the pilot, I saw four different roles,” Amell explained.
“Normally they break down into the day-to-day process of filming.
“We may shoot an episode where I have a day as fake Oliver in the real world right now, followed by an island day” — Amell’s character is found stranded on a desert island at the story’s outset — “and then there’s a straight Arrow action day. It’s a fun exercise. It keeps me on my toes.
“That’s what intrigues me most about all this. It’s a superhero show, or at least an opportunity for me to play a superhero, but I saw it first as a really interesting acting exercise.”
I had to exercise muscles I didn’t even know existed. STEPHEN AMELL, ACTOR