Being Bad Never Looked So Good. Check out the abs on Stephen Amell’s billionaire playboy Oliver Queen tonight in the series premiere of Arrow on the CW and CTV Two. Missing and thought dead for five years after a shipwreck, Queen returns home a changed man. He secretly creates the persona of vigilante Arrow to fight crime and corruption in Starling City with martial arts and technology plus the special skill of archery.
By day, Queen continues to play the part of the billionaire cad he used to be while trying to make amends with those he wronged, like his former girlfriend Dinah “Laurel” Lance, who works for a legal aid group called CNRI (Canary!). But she’s having none of it. “I didn’t grieve. I was too angry,” Katie Cassidy’s Lance tells Amell’s Queen in a scene filmed for the premiere in Gastown next to Chill Winston last March.
And what about Oliver Queen’s best friend Tommy Merlyn? Colin Donnell plays him as a rich trustafarian and one hell-of-a-ride, the Mercedes 2012 SLS AMG ,with two wings and cockpit, as the ad says. Arrow filmed a scene below for the premiere of Queen and Merlyn talking in the Mercedes in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, with background performers dressed as street people gathered around a fire in a drum nearby.
In sharp contrast to the Downtown Eastside, Arrow also filmed scenes for the premiere at historic Hadley Castle at Royal Roads University in Victoria as the Queen family mansion. The oceanfront castle also played Lex Luther’s estate in Smallville and Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the X-Men franchise.
But the most anticipated scene of tonight’s premiere has to be of ripped Stephen Amell doing a salmon ladder pull up in an old warehouse as part of his secret Arrow training. Amell can never do enough Arrow training on camera, if you ask me.
Arrow debuts tonight at 8 p.m. on The CW in the U.S. and CTV Two in Canada.