'Arrow' Update: Baron Reiter Won't Be Baron Blitzkreig, Show Executive Producer Explains
The continuously-growing cast list of The CW's hit superhero TV drama series "Arrow" added another face this week for its upcoming Season 4. The show's executive producer broke down the real identity of the newly cast character.
British actor Jimmy Akingbola has been cast as Baron Reiter. The character was known by comic book readers as the Nazi super villain Baron Blitzkreig.
Show runner Marc Guggenheim explained that Akingbola's Reiter will serve as a main villain in Oliver Queen's (Stephen Amell) flashbacks while the newcomer Neal McDonough and his Damien Darhk fills the role of Queen's present day enemy.
"We wanted a really great villain for Oliver in the flashbacks," he told Entertainment Weekly. "We wanted to come out of the gate strong with someone great and we wanted to, quite frankly, cast the best actor. As it turns out, our best actor was African-American."
The Reiter=Blitzkerig notion, on the other hand, was clarified by the executive producer.
"We took the name Baron Reiter without any intention of turning him into Baron Blitzkrieg. Baron Blitzkreig is the evil Nazi super villain. Baron Reiter is not going to become Baron Blitzkreig in the show," Guggenheim said.
"We never planned on actually telling a story about a bad guy who is a Nazi," he continued. "In fact, when people meet this character, he's not German, he's not a Nazi, he doesn't subscribe to any Nazi philosophies. We were attracted to an organization that actually in the comics had been associated with Deathstroke called Shadowspire. In the comics, Baron Reiter became associated with Shadowspire."
"Arrow" returns to The CW this Oct. 7 at 8 p.m.
