HARD AND FAST
No one’s more surprised about The Flash’s freak success than Tom Cavanagh
Tom Cavanagh’s hidden power? He’s super pragmatic. He’ll admit, for instance, that when he initially signed on to star in The Flash, the CW’S hit superhero drama, he wasn’t terribly optimistic. “I always assume every show is just going to get cancelled,” he says. “You have to be realistic about it. I’ve been in shows that weren’t great, and ones I thought were homeruns that got cancelled after a few episodes. So your job is to tell the story as best you can before they bring down the hammer.”
That sounds awfully cynical — until you read Cavanagh’s IMDB page. His last decade looks, at times, like a catacomb of canned-too-soon TV series: Love Monkey, My Ex-life, Eli Stone, Trust Me. The Ottawa-born actor broke out in the early aughts as the lead in Ed, a quirky NBC sitcom about a hotshot New York lawyer forced to start from zero in small-town USA. His likeable, sweet turn in the show made him a go-to actor for likeable, sweet roles in rom-coms. Which was fine and all, if not just a tad limiting. “For a while, people were like, ‘Well, he just plays nice guys,’” he says. “You have to remind people you’re an actor.”
And remind them Cavanagh has — on The Flash, now in its third season, he plays Dr. Harrison Wells, Flash’s sometimes ally, sometimes arch-nemesis, depending on which alternate timeline he’s been yanked out of. Portraying such a madcap character with multiple iterations could easily veer into the realm of caricature, but Cavanagh pulls it off with restraint, grounding his performance even when the script gets loopy. It’s made the 52-year-old a critical standout on the show, which also happens to be the highest-rated series in the CW’S history.
Still, Cavanagh’s not getting too over the moon about this late-career resurgence. He’s a realist. As such, he’s already got his mind on his next job, and even sees this very interview as an opportunity to line that up. “Kevin Smith is making an Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai reboot,” he says. “I’d love to work with the guy on that. I’m going to put him in a headlock and further that discussion by telling it to you. Now it’s out there.”
Can you blame him? You know how it is in this industry: any good fortune you’re having today could be gone in a flash.