Joseph David-Jones On Legends of Tomorrow and The Divergent Series: Allegiant

If you, like so many fans, thought “Star City 2046” was the best episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow yet this year, it’s likely you have some fondness for actor Joseph David-Jones, who played Connor Hawke in that episode.

Will he be back? Well, so far we aren’t sure, but it sounds fairly good. Meanwhile, David-Jones has a new film in theaters this week, and it’s a biggie: The Divergent Series: Allegiant heads to U.S. cinemas this week, and David-Jones is one of the people working to keep order (oh, and kill the heroes).

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ComicBook.com spoke with David-Jones recently about both roles.

So first off — I’m of the age where Connor Hawke was the Green Arrow when I was actually reading. You are quite a bit younger than me. How do you ever heard of that character before you had to go into that audition?

No. I guess I kind of been aware of him, but when I went in for the audition it was a completely different name and everything. So I didn’t know who the guy was … I was just like what is this? Because I think the name in the audition was Collin Osprey or something.

I was just confused about who it was. I didn’t know until I got it and they told me like hey that was just a fake name we were giving out to kind of conceal it, even though the Internet found out about the role in like 2 seconds.

And now you are moving Allegiant which is in terms of scope, how much bigger is the scope and scale of that, than anything else that you’ve ever done?

Allegiant came right before Legends and everything so it kind of helped generate enough buzz about me for me to be able to go in and be recruited for this.

Now, before we jump into totally into Allegiant, I actually had another Legends question for you: have you talked to them about the possibility of coming back?

Yeah. I know that a couple of the writers are trying to push to get me back in there and everything because they really, really liked what happened with the episode getting a lot of good reviews and everything, but I don’t know what they’re going to come up with or what even is going to happen with Connor Hawke. I know that they’ve been talking about the potential that could now come of it because they do circle the idea of planning to cycle out some of the cast on the ship.

So I don’t know what’s going to happen or if that time line is still set, until they actually do go back in the past, because that’s when you’ll get the effect of them leaving. They’re trying to do what they can. So we’ll see what happens. There are a couple different ideas floating around. We just have to hope this isn’t the last time we see Connor Hawke.

What can you tell us about your role in Allegiant because for those of us … Like I didn’t read the books, I’ve seen the films but how is this a new character for this installment, the third movie? What can you tell us about what your character is bringing to the larger plot.

This is a new character. So he isn’t in the books. And they’ve done that a couple times with like the last Insurgent movie, where they had Edgar in there, but he wasn’t in the books.

So when you have this city that’s just lost its old regime of what people were used to, like where it was factioned and everything. Suddenly, a message just comes up that says like “hey everybody, this was an experiment. The experiment has come up positive. “Please come outside of the wall,” whatever.

Along with this, the leader the society, Joann, has been executed, killed by Evelyn. This film takes place 2 weeks after that, where people are trying to get over the wall and the people in charge want to shut them down. Now we have this new society where people are trying to basically find what this is, like what their identity is in this new society without factions.

And the person who’s really taking the helm, is Naomi Watts’s character, Evelyn, because in the last movie we saw her building an army.

So now we have this factionless army and we’re getting introduced to the different characters and stuff, within this factionless army’s regime and where my character comes in. Hollis wants to be a general in Naomi Watt’s army. So I’m currently a second in command in the factionless army. You get to kind of see me interacting with the heroes because they battle with going over the wall, but Hollis and the factionless army want to make sure everybody stays inside, until they figure out what is going on outside. These people locked us in a cage, so we are preparing for war with the people outside of the wall, not knowing what to expect.

Now, even just from the trailers, we see that things get pretty ugly inside of the walls to. Is this one of those scenarios where the society that you exist in, is going to blame this all on the outsiders? Or once our heroes come in, is it kind of generalized mayhem?

It is generalized mayhem, but there’s reasoning behind it. Basically what happens is once the society gets taken down, you have two groups of people. One of them, probably like the factions and people who identify with them from other factions and everything. And the other side of it are the Allegiants.

The Allegiant believe that the society they had before with factions, it was the ideal society. It was what was supposed to happen and everything. So they are trying to really hold on to that kind of ideal society, but on the other hand you have the factionless people who were rejected by that society.

So this starts a huge civil war inside the walls basically. You see this and it escalates, as people try to get out over the wall and when they do get over the wall, there’s still this war going on between the people inside because no one has control anymore.

As an actor, when you look at a situation like the Divergent franchise, even just the base of their society and the philosophy that drives their society is so alien, is it hard to climb into that headspace and really relate to the characters? Is that something you have to really prepare for?

I think with something like this, even though the society is foreign, the people’s intentions and how they feel are still the same. So this is a character who has been rejected his whole life. He’s been told he doesn’t belong inside of a faction or anything.

So when you see him lashing out against all of these people and everything, who told him that he doesn’t belong. Even the people outside the wall and he doesn’t know them. It’s understandable, and it’s easy to relate to. Just like, let’s say, you’ve been rejected by family.

So there’s almost kind of universality of that because even though the details are very, very strange, the fundamental driving force is something very relatable and human.

Oh yeah. And I think this film does a really good job at keeping it that way because it is like a society where it’s so foreign to us and everything, for you have to be this and you have to be that, and I guess it can be familiar too. But the key thing is just about those primal human characteristics and everything and what makes us us, makes it relatable. It makes people be able to watch and enjoy it.

In the last 5-6 years, we’ve had The Hunger Games, we’ve had the Divergent, we had Mad Max: Fury Road. There’s something going on right now in cinema where we just kind of want to see everything torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Can you put your finger on what it is that’s appealing about this sort of fiction?

I don’t know what it is about these post apocalyptic movies where it’s like…people really want to see what happens and know what goes on in people’s minds when they lose everything. With nothing left of what we had, do people revert back to animals or stay civilized?

I think its that conflict between them whetherto become animals to, I don’t know, eat, kill, hunt and everything or if they’re going to fight and stay civilized. It’s like The Walking Dead or something.

Yeah. And we’ll see how three-dimensional it is. It all depends on what they kept in this film because in this I am the bad guy but I do have understandable motivations for why I’m doing this and everything. So we’ll see if they’ll just portray me, as just this guy who is trying to see the world burn and just doing bad things, or if its like completely understandable this guy’s literally just trying to keep people inside of this wall trying to keep order, trying to keep people safe and meanwhile our heroes are trying to like escape and trying to break out or whatever.

The way that I describe those sorts of antagonists in a lot of these stories is that they’re kind of anti terrorist. With terrorism the idea is to inflict fear in your enemy. In the case of the kind of character you’re talking about who’s scrambling to maintain some scrap of order, it’s almost like everything you do, comes from a place of fear and a place of just trying to hang on to what will you have. Is that kind of a fair description?

Oh yeah, that’s great. You did a better job of summarizing it than I did.