Riverdale EP Compares Hiram Lodge to Marvel's Kingpin

When it comes to the drama on The CW's Riverdale, it isn't all serial killers, dangerous games, and sinister cults. There's plenty of family drama to go around as well, especially when it comes to the Lodge family. Veronica's father, Hiram, has been at the center of quite a bit of the dark happenings in Riverdale and spent a good portion of Season 3 locked in a battle of sorts with Veronica. While it appeared last week that Veronica had finally gotten the upper hand on her father, as Riverdale's season finale revealed, Daddy Lodge is still manipulating things from behind bars and for executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, it's that kind of power that makes Hiram quite a bit like Marvel's Kingpin.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Aguirre-Sacasa compared the two characters, and noted that we're far from done with Hiram as a villain.

"Here's what I love about Mark Consuelos: Sometimes when you make a character a villain, the actor's like, 'I don't want to do this, the fans will hate me.'," Aguirre-Sacasa said. "Mark is the exact opposite. Whenever he gets a script, he calls me or texts me and he's like, 'Okay, another item checked on my bucket list.'"

"Hiram's like the Kingpin from the Spidey comics or The Punisher," he continued. "He's powerful no matter where he is, jail or no jail. In the finale, a little bit of a hint: When Hermione is arrested, she is on the phone with someone and she says, 'I can't believe Hiram was hiding that from me,' and before Hermione can tell Veronica what that is, she's arrested. We're going to pick that thread up in season 4 -- the mystery of what Hiram was hiding."

The Hiram mystery isn't the only one Riverdale's season finale set up for Season 4, either. One of the last moments of the episode saw a flash forward that teased a grim fate for one of the show's Core Four, Jughead Jones. Aguirre-Sacasa explained that getting to that point would also be something that will play out next season.

"Next season is the kids' senior year. It's their last year in high school, and we really want to locate their stories in the high school world," Aguirre-Sacasa said. "We started talking about what the big mystery could be, and we said it would be great if we kind of kept it in the high school kind of world. The other thing that we wanted to do is, this year Archie and Veronica weren't that involved in the Gargoyle King mystery — it was more Betty and Jughead. We loved the core four together in the finale. We wanted to do something that tied them all together for the core mystery and for a big secret, and it felt like having them all around that bonfire, minus Jughead, would be a way to tie them all together so that when we get to the central mystery of what happened that night and what led to the events of burning their clothes, it would be all of our foursome and not the kids split off again."

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

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