Stephen Amell will soon be back on our small screens, as he’s starring as Ted Black in Suits L.A., the Suits spinoff that’s a little more than a week away from its premiere on the 2025 TV schedule. However, it’s still safe to say that most people know Amell best from his time playing Oliver Queen, a.k.a. Green Arrow, in Arrow and various other Arrowverse series. Arrow brought Amell to prominence, and while he’s grateful for the DC TV shows, he also explained why working on those first few seasons were challenging for him.
In an interview with Variety, Stephen Amell said he felt like he’d been “shot out of a cannon” at the time he was cast as Oliver Queen and began working on Arrow. But looking back, he didn’t enjoy working on the TV show 10 months out of the year, and he described the stress he experienced on the first several years on this integral CW series thusly:
The first two or three years of ‘Arrow,’ I was gripping so tight. I was white-knuckling it. The hours were long. By the time we got to the fifth episode of the first season, I’d worked more on that show than I’d ever worked on anything in my life. I was never a monster. I was never disrespectful — but I had a short fuse. And you learn as you go.
The TV landscape was a lot different when Arrow started airing on The CW. The show’s first six seasons consisted of 23 episodes yet, and Season 7 was just one shorter, while the final season only had 10 episodes. This is the way things work in broadcast TV usually, but these days, the majority of superhero TV shows are either going direct to streaming or airing on one of the cable channels, so there aren’t nearly as many episodes being ordered per season. Basically, if Arrow were to go into production now, chances are it’d only have 8-10 episodes a season and either air on HBO first or go straight to the people who have a Max subscription.
Acting for a 23-episode TV season year after year would be challenging for any actor, but Arrow was also action-heavy, requiring Stephen Amell to perform in these intensive sequences while wearing that tight costume and shooting arrows. I don’t blame him for feeling overwhelmed so early into making Season 1, and while I wouldn’t condone being disrespectful to anyone on set, I probably would also have a short fuse at times. With those long hours and all that was being physically and mentally asked of me, it would quickly become draining.
Following Arrow concluding in 2020, Amell reprised Oliver Queen one last time for an episode of The Flash’s final season. Now he’s back on network TV for Suits L.A., which premieres Sunday, February 23 on NBC, with episodes becoming available to stream with a Peacock subscription afterwards. While the spinoff was surely challenging in different ways, at least it’s not nearly as physically demanding of him and there are less episodes to do in the season. If you’re interested in revisiting his work on Arrow, it can be streamed with a Netflix subscription.
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