If you watched the Arrow premiere episode last night (as you should have — it was awesome), you will have noticed that the titular hero has some rather impressive moves. He scales walls! He leaps across impossible gaps! He does that crazy salmon-ladder pull-up thing!
As this video of Arrow star Stephen Amell shows, all of it is real.
One of The CW’s first promo videos for Arrow featured a scene in which Oliver Queen, aka the Arrow, prepared himself to fight crime with a bit of a shirtless workout. Ever since then, just about everyone has been asking Stephen Amell if the scene was real and if it was really him doing that amazing feat.
This video, a shoot for Emmy Magazine, shows how real the whole thing was. Watch it now and be amazed.
emmy from patrik giardino on Vimeo.
Impressive, right?
How is any of this possible for Arrow star Stephen Amell? We had a chance to ask the actor about his rather amazing physical work when visiting the Arrow set in Vancouver (Thanks for that, Warner Bros!). Naturally, the salmon-ladder trick came up. “We haven’t done the salmon ladder again,” Amell said, breaking the hearts of fans everywhere. But… “There have been some physical feats, impractical ways to climb ropes. We have sort of the inverse of the salmon ladder coming up in this episode, episode 8.”
That’s OK then.
Need a reminder about what happened in the Arrow premiere? Check out BuddyTV’s recap here.
Amell credited the team coordinated stunts and fights on Arrow for a lot of the amazing things we saw in the pilot. “For the fight training, it’s all been James Banford,” Amell explained. “I learned the basics and then he sort of walks me through the fight.”
Is it always Stephen Amell doing the Arrow’s crazy stunts? Mostly, yes. But not always. “Unfortunately, there are instances where I don’t get enough time to prep, in which case Simon Burnett — who is my very, very ,very capable stunt double — will do the lion’s share of the work. Not because I can’t,” Stephen Amell clarified, “But just because of logistics and safety.”
It would definitely be a shame to hurt the star of Arrow.
Will the level of physical fitness seen in this video and in the Arrow pilot continue throughout the season? Stephen Amell hopes so. “On the pilot, I had a lot of prep time,” he said. “I’m not getting to go to the gym as much as I want… You can’t look one way in the poster and not look that way in the episode.”
The kind of workouts seen in this video will therefore continue. And this is good for all of us.
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8pm on The CW.
(Photos courtesy of The CW, video courtesy of Emmy Magazine)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
Laurel grew up in Mamaroneck, NY, Grosse Pointe, MI and Bellevue WA. She then went on to live in places like Boston, Tucson, Houston, Wales, Tanzania, Prince Edward Island and New York City before heading back to Seattle. Ever since early childhood, when she became addicted to The Muppet Show, Laurel has watched far too much TV. Current favorites include Chuck, Modern Family, Supernatural, Mad Men and Community. Laurel received a BA in Astrophysics (yes, that is possible) from Colgate University and a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and History of Science from Columbia University before she realized that television is much better than studying.
