Stephen Amell is playing a Queen. Oliver Queen, to be precise, in the new CW action series Arrow. And while initial jokes about the character’s name may be juvenile, viewers will see in the pilot episode that this is not a kid’s comic book series. (Be warned, the Queen jokes are going to be coming much too easily.)
Based on the popular DC Comics character, Amell plays a billionaire playboy who had been written off as dead but returns very much alive with not only a jaw-dropping torso but with mystery shrouding what happened on the island where he had been living for five years. What we do know is that instead of all-night clubbing and partying he once indulged in, Queen is now focused on fighting crime (some possibly within his own family) and, bow and arrow in hand, dons a costume to become Arrow.
Arrow kicks off October 10th and was co-developed by out producer Greg Berlanti. It promises to be a fairly serious and dark show, and yet the handsome Amell is anything but as he sat down with AfterElton recently to talk about how Queer As Folk saved his acting career, his disappointment that he wasn’t going to be having sex with men on Hung and how exactly he mastered that impressive "salmon ladder" climb that he takes on (shirtless, thankfully) in the Arrow pilot.
Our chat began with Amell talking first about his very keen awareness of our Morning Meme…
Stephen Amell: What’s the one you guys write on Monday mornings?
AfterElton: We do the Morning Meme every morning…,
SA: So before there was all this Arrow-related stuff…every Monday I could count on the Morning Meme from AfterElton, and it would just show up every day. Oh! I check my IMDb on Monday or something like that and I would see it [there]!
Nothing more intimidating (or hotter) than a Queen with a bow & arrow, right? 
AE: Nice! Speaking of your IMDb page, you’ve done so many different things, whether it’s on Dante’s Cove, Hung and I saw you were a spinning instructor on Queer as Folk?
SA: First job ever.
AE: Was it really?
SA: Yeah. I had been acting for four months. I had never gotten a job yet, and I said to my agent, because I was a spinning instructor at the time, I said, ‘If I don’t get this job, I quit,’ figuring that me being a spinning instructor would be totally important. It wasn’t important at all, but I did get the job.
AE: What was your experience like on Dante’s Cove? (Amell played Adam during season 1)
SA: At first it was a horrible experience because we had a terrible director. They fired him. They brought on a really great guy. Then the following year they wanted to take the Adam character…he obviously was not straight any more. Then I booked [the movie] Closing the Ring, and I put in that I couldn’t do it. So they cast Jon Fleming. I’m still friends with Charlie David.
If Hung had lasted, Jason's rent-boy services would've included men. (Damn you, HBO!)
AE: It seems like it’s not really that long ago but there you were playing on a gay-centric show, and I would guess some people – agents and managers – might say, ‘Hey, early in your career…you’ll get pigeonholed.’ But obviously that didn’t happen.
SA: No. It didn’t happen at all. One of the things that I liked on Hung, which we didn’t get a chance to explore in the fourth season [the show was cancelled after season 3] was Jason Does Dudes. Male prostitution is part and parcel of the whole thing, and we didn’t get to explore tha. But clearly we would have, and I would have been more than comfortable shooting that because it’s HBO, and it would have been real and that would have been that.
AE: What was the number one appeal of doing Arrow?
SA: Playing a superhero on TV. For sure. I always wanted to play a villain, but then I read the pilot and the pilot is unflinching. I mean, I kill a guy with my bare hands. I don’t want to, but I have an ultimate goal and he’s collateral damage. It’s acceptable. It’s an acceptable loss. It weighs on me, but it’s acceptable. When I read the pilot I had a picture of it in my head, and it was exactly as I wanted it to be. Then when I spoke with the producers and the director and I asked them what their vision was, the two synched up perfectly. So then I got really excited.
AE: Would you say with a show like this sometimes the line between good and evil is not really that far apart?
SA: [nods] I’d love it to be blurred all the time. For example, my buddy on the show, Tommy [Merlyn], played by Colin Donnell…there’s a lineage towards Merlyn, who’s the Arrow’s nemesis. I would love for him to play such a great villain and have such convincing points that some people would be, ‘Merlyn’s kind of got a point.’ I mean, that’s awesome. I hope that people always respect what Oliver’s doing, but not everyone has to like it. And I’m fine with that.
Um...we're sold! When does this show start again? (October 10th!)
AE: You’re a very fit guy, but is there physical stuff you’re doing that you’re shocked you’re doing…that you’re able to do or that they’re letting you do?
SA: Getting into Parkour and all that free running business…that was pretty cool because you take lessons at that and try new things. Then they’ll just go, ‘Okay, challenge.’ And you’ll do something in that challenge that you’ve never done. You’ll probably fail, and fall, and whatever. But it’s a great way to learn. We shot something in the second episode where I’m working with knives and there’s a very impractical way of climbing a rope. You get this adrenaline that’s going and you’re shooting it. And then the next day you hurt. Bad.
AE: Now, the one thing that we see you do in the pilot…
SA: …the salmon ladder. Yeah.
AE: Is that something you had done before?
SA: No. I didn’t go to the gym with Hung and all that stuff. I stayed fit, but it wasn’t for any purpose. When I got this part, it was training for a purpose. I actually got a little bit bigger in the pilot than I wanted to get so I’m a little bit smaller now and leaner and a little bit more functional. But I did have a chin-up bar in my house so I was good at chin-ups. What the salmon ladder ostensibly is, it’s a chin-up dance move, where if you just tried to force it, it’s almost impossible. You have to move your body, then react back and go. It looks harder than it is, which is good. Don’t tell anyone.
AE: I won’t tell. Do you know if the writers are they planning any gay characters or storylines?
SA: I haven’t heard anything about that, but I would hope that they would, if for no other reason than the m.o. and the talking point of the producers all the time is, we’re planting a show in the real world, where there are gay people.
Crimefigher or one of Gaga's Little Monsters? (Maybe BOTH!)
AE: I know Greg likes to do that, and he doesn’t push it…make it natural.
SA: They should do that…not for spectacle or for viewership, but just because.
[Greg Berlanti told us at TCAs when asked if we’d see a gay presence on Arrow. “That’s always my hope. I think it’s part of the fabric of our culture, and we’re trying to do shows that always represent that. There isn’t as of right now, but my hope would be by the end of the first season.”]
AE: It seems like mainstream comic books kind of steer away from that.
SA: Didn’t a character just come out of the closet in the comics. A mainstream character just came out of the closet. [DC Comics revealed in June that Alan Scott, a.k.a. Green Lantern, will be revealed to be gay.] If Gus Fring [Giancarlo Esposito’s character on AMC’s Breaking Bad] can be gay…the greatest villain in television history is gay! But we can have gay villains and gay heroines on Arrow.
AE: The pilot’s also fairly dark and serious. Is there going to be some humor in the show?
SA: There will be humor, because you can’t be heavy all the time. Oliver is…the person that he’s pretending to be when he comes back to [present day], he’s is a little bit of a showman, so he’s charismatic. The second episode, yes…the third episode…I’ve seen a little bit of it, too, and I think there will be some humor in there. But in terms of lightening up…we had 17 days to shoot the pilot. We have eight days to shoot subsequent episodes.
Now, what that has forced up into is a show that even I think breaks away from being a rigidly set up, immaculately lit show. It makes it a little bit grainier and a little bit more frenetic. We had to do a lot of Steadicam stuff, a lot of single shot stuff and that creates real moments. We set up these squibs, that are sort of these explosives that look like a bullet hitting a wall and then exploding out. We were shooting a scene just on Friday night. I was running through. I got blasted in the face with one of them. I got a bunch of stuff in my eye. And it creates a real moment. So I love the second episode. I think it’s really cool.
AE: I heard Candice Accola [Caroline on Vampire Diaries, where Amell guested] tweeted about you two playing Scrabble on set...
SA: I like vocabulary and I actually read a book called Word Freak, which is about a guy who basically went into competitive Scrabble for a year. But having a big vocabulary and being good at Scrabble are not the same thing. There’s a strategy to Scrabble which I didn’t fully understand, which is not to put too fine a point on it, but Candice just destroyed me in Scrabble, and I maybe haven’t gotten over it.
AE: Guilty food pleasure that you just have a really hard time saying no to?
SA: The almonds, nut cluster guys. I love those. I have found some gluten-and dairy-free ice cream that I can get after. If I could have one thing that I would cheat on I would take a big thing of popcorn and just dump a bunch of M&Ms into it and just go to town.
AE: Now you’re talking my language!
Arrow premieres on October 10th at 8/7c on the CW.
