Current Arrowverse producer and former Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim revealed he attempted to get Smallville‘s Green Arrow actor Justin Hartley to cameo on the show for years with no success. Arrow, which recently concluded its eight-season run on The CW, jump started the Arrowverse fans have come to know and love. The universe includes The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and the new hit Batwoman, which has sparked some controversy among fans.
Arrow premiered back in 2012, long before superhero shows were so present in the television zeitgeist. It starred Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, a billionaire playboy who gets stranded on a deserted island after getting lost at sea. Five years later, he returns home a new man motivated to clean up his crime-riddled city as a hooded vigilante adorned with a bow and arrow. The show became a beloved favorite for the network and culminated in the massive superhero crossover event Crisis On Infinite Earths, which brought Queen’s character arc to its close in addition to having exciting cameos from the likes of Smallville’s Tom Welling and Kevin Conroy’s Batman.
In a recent interview with Fake Nerd Podcast, Guggenheim opened up about pursuing Smallville’s Hartley to reprise his role as Oliver Queen on the show. He discussed how he to attempted to court Hartley to appear on the network show, but came up short. He also discussed using Hartley’s costume in 2018’s Elseworlds crossover:
I’ll tell you, Justin is someone that I’ve been trying to get on Arrow for years. I did send down the request, ‘Could we borrow the costume from the archives?’ They said yes, but they said yes with a lot of caveats, not the least of which is, ‘No one can wear it,’ and ‘You can’t get it dirty.’ So we put it on a dummy, so thereby we satisfied that loophole, and as far as not getting it dirty, hopefully whoever at the archives provided it to us never actually saw that episode.
It’s always a treat when a showrunner decides to divulge juicy behind the scenes information such as attempted castings of fan-favorite actors. Hartley was a terrific Green Arrow in his own right, delivering a layered, highly likable portrayal of the comic book character on Smallville for several years. It would’ve been a very satisfying surprise for fans, especially if he had made an appearance in Crisis On Infinite Earths since he could’ve possibly shared the screen again with Welling. In fact, The CW tried to convince Smallville’s Lex Luthor Michael Rosenbaum to return as well. However, fans had plenty of surprises to drool over during the crossover event, the most shocking certainly being Ezra Miller’s Flash crossing paths with Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen.
Hartley has been a busy man these days, starring in NBC’s massive hit This Is Us, which just finished season 4 on the network, and making appearances in films like Jexi as well as more recently the highly controversial The Hunt. He may have been a difficult man to track down, but regardless fans can enjoy revisiting the five-part crossover event as it will be aired again due to the delay of new Arrowverse episodes as an effect of the coronavirus causing numerous TV and film productions to shut down. Arrow fans can also revisit season 8 of the show when it hits dvd and blu-ray on April 28th.
