• April 2, 2018
• Leave a Comment on Arrow Showrunner Discusses [SPOILER]’s Exit
• Arrow, Spoilers, Television, The CW
• Arrow, Arrowverse, marc guggenheim, The CW, Thea Queen, Willa Holland

Arrow Showrunner Discusses [SPOILER]’s Exit

This past Thursday, The CW’s Arrow said farewell to OG castmember Willa Holland. Speedy sped away in a red car with Roy Harper and Nyssa al Ghul to track down / destroy three Lazarus Pits that her father, Malcolm Merlyn, had discovered at some point prior to his death.

Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim sat down with TVLine to discuss Holland’s exit. Here are a few excerpts from the interview.

How long has this been in motion, the plan to write out Willa?

By the end of Season 4, Willa had expressed a desire to reduce her episodic commitment to the show and that was sort of done in sort of conjunction with an indication that it was likely that she wouldn’t want to renew her contract past Season 6. So, we’ve kind of known for a while that this was in the offing. We revisited it with Willa at the beginning of Season 6, and she indicated that she hadn’t changed her mind, that she was still interested in moving on.

We talked about some requests she had for us in terms of how her episodes would be utilized and grouped, and at what point in the season she would be written out, and we accommodated her on all those fronts because, look, at the end of the day we love Willa and we love working with her. She’s done right by us and so we wanted to do right by her.

It’s my understanding that part of what made it difficult for you, in considering her wish, was removing this important part of Oliver’s family.

That’s the thing. Apart from not getting a chance to work with Willa, that was probably the most painful aspect of it, because when we adapted the Green Arrow comic to live-action, one of the earliest and the biggest changes we made from the comic was to give Oliver a family. In the comic, he didn’t have siblings and his parents were both dead. This was a significant relationship for him and also, I think, one of the most effective elements of the show. The relationship between Stephen and Willa on camera was wonderful. But though we went into the season knowing that he’d be losing this relationship, we also knew he’d be—

Gaining a wife, gaining a son.

He’d be gaining a wife. He’d be gaining a son. And while we would do our best not to replace the relationship with Thea, we wanted to maintain a family element in his life.

Was it all that Colton Haynes needed to hear, that he was coming back for Willa’s sendoff, to get him to sign on for another encore?

Actually, it’s funny — no. I had bumped into Colton on the Fox lot months earlier and we started talking and he expressed a desire to come back to the show, because he had a window of free time. I was like, “Actually, that works out great!” It worked out really, really well because we always knew that in a perfect world, Thea’s departure from the show would involve Roy in some way. Roy’s been such a big part of her story that [Colton’s return] was a fortuitous circumstance.

Arrow airs Thursdays @ 9pm ET on The CW.

H/T: TVLine