'Arrow' Star Stephen Amell Has Shaved His Beard

After years of fans asking when Oliver Queen would wear a beard on Arrow, series star Stephen [...]

By Russ Burlingame

After years of fans asking when Oliver Queen would wear a beard on Arrow, series star Stephen Amell has been sporting some impressive facial hair in photos and trailers from season seven...but that era seems to have ended.

Amell just shared a side-by-side image of himself from an Arrow behind-the-scenes still and another one that was apparently taken today and presumably off-set. With the caption "Wednesday/Thursday," the biggest difference between the two is that Amell's beard is gone in the Thursday image.

Green Arrow has typically worn a van dyke beard in the comics, but Amell has gone for a whiskered look since the start of the series and avoided the full beard.

During a recent interview, Amell told ComicBook.com that when the beard was no longer absolutely essential for the show's storytelling, he would shave down to a goatee and see how it looked -- but that he would not keep it if it would not look good on camera. It appears as though either he decided it did not look good on camera, or maybe the story called for him to more fully shave than he had anticipated.

The season will begin in a dark place, with Oliver in prison, and Amell has said that Oliver will make some choices fans might not approve of.

"One scene in the premiere, what Oliver does is reprehensible," Amell said at San Diego Comic-Con. "There's nothing about him that is heroic at all [in the episode]."

Amell elaborated a bit on that idea in a previous interview, noting that he hopes the premiere upsets fans.

"Obviously, you want to lean into things that you think fans would want, right?" Amell suggested in a previous interview. "Concurrently, I'm all for things that make fans mad, because mad is no different than happy. The only thing that I don't want is indifference. I always joke with fans about my alter-ego, Evil Story Steve. If you were to tell me, you know, that four people died in the season premiere of Arrow in season seven, I'd be very sad … but my alter-ego, Evil Story Steve, would be like, 'Oh – that's very exciting; why'd that happen?'"

"So, I think that making fans happy, clearly, is what you wanna do when you're on a show in general because you want people to keep watching, as long as you're not afraid to lean into things that may make them go, 'But why would you do that? I hate that. That's awful,' because that's not actually what they mean. If someone screams out on Twitter, 'I'm gonna stop watching the show!' they're probably not gonna stop watching the show, you know what I mean?" Amell added.

The season seven premiere of Arrow, which is titled "Inmate 4587", will debut on Monday, October 15th, at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

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