While Grant Gustin made his first big splash on TV when he recurred as Sebastian Smythe on Glee, it was playing Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash, that catapulted him to worldwide fame. After guest-starring in two Arrow Season 2 episodes, Gustin took center stage for The Flash TV series in fall 2014, which ended up airing for nine seasons on The CW (and I covered it for the entirety of that time). Looking back on this time of his life, Gustin admitted he was always confident that the Arrow spinoff would have a long and “popular” run (pun intended), but co-star Jesse L. Martin, who played Joe West, wasn’t so sure in the beginning.
Gustin recently went on the The Sackhoff Show to chat with host Katee Sackhoff, who played Amunet Black in a handful of The Flash episodes. When the Battlestar Galactica and The Mandalorian actress brought up how Gustin couldn’t have known he’d end up leading The Flash for nine seasons, the Barry Allen actor acknowledged that was true, but then explained:
I think I was naive to the fact that it was gonna run a long time. The contract we signed for six years, and I was like, ‘We’ll do six years.’… Because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t know that’s not a thing that you should assume. But Arrow was popular and it was a spinoff of that. No offense to the character of [Green] Arrow, but we were about to make The Flash, and it’s a little bit more well known. And I also understood that’s going to be a little harder, and it was over the years, to keep it interesting and to tell a story about The Fastest Man Alive, and that’s a complicated power for TV, and it creates a lot of struggles with plot to keep it consistent and realistic and interesting. And we did struggle with that over the years, but I was like, ‘If Arrow’s popular, we’re gonna be popular.’ And I just remember Jesse Martin being like, ‘Bro, that’s not how it works. We’re lucky if we get renewed this year.’ Even then, even hearing that from someone like Jesse that I trusted and respected, I was like, ‘We’re fine.’
On the one hand, I can see where Jesse L. Martin was coming from as an experienced TV actor. At the point in his career he was arguably best known on the small screen for playing Detective Ed Green in Law & Order, a role he inhabited for nearly 200 episodes. On the other hand, The Flash was also several years removed from Martin’s stints on the NBC shows The Philanthropist, which only lasted one eight-episode season, and Smash, which was cancelled after two seasons. He knew how hard it was for shows to get renewed once, let alone last multiple seasons, so he wanted Grant Gustin to manage his expectations accordingly.
Gustin may have been naive, but he ultimately under-predicted The Flash’s level of success. At 184 episodes across nine seasons, it was the longest-running Arrowverse show, as Arrow concluded after eight seasons of 170 episodes. He also made a good point that The Flash is a more well-known character than Green Arrow, which is even more true today thanks to Ezra Miller having also portrayed the Scarlet Speedster in the DCEU. As such, there was more material to work with and stood a slightly better shot of hooking viewers.
So Grant Gustin got to spend close to a full decade bringing Barry Allen to life, and earlier this year, he admitted that if James Gunn asked him to reprise Flash in the DC Universe, he’d accept that offer. Should that day come, we’ll let you know. Until then, The Flash can be streamed alongside Arrow and many of the other Arrowverse shows with a Netflix subscription.
