Ask any of the stars of The CW’s Arrowverse what the most difficult thing to shoot each season is and they will almost universally tell you it’s the crossovers. Putting together three or four shows — depending on the crossover — with one overarching storyline while juggling shooting schedules for each of the series, it certainly sounds like it would be something that would take its toll and leave an actor pretty wiped out. But that state of exhaustion also leads to some pretty memorable moments and for Arrow star Stephen Amell, it’s Melissa Benoist‘s unexpected nap during “Crisis on Earth-X” that is favorite Arrowverse story to tell.
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Answering fan questions during his appearance at Megacon Orlando last weekend, Amell, was asked what his favorite on-set moment was, and he was quick to answer with a story about Supergirl‘s Benoist falling asleep while filming a scene during the “Crisis on Earth-X” event.
“My favorite story to tell about being on set? Oh man, I’m just really glad that the video evidence of Melissa Benoist falling asleep came out online,” Amell said. “If people aren’t familiar, we were filming the crossover and there’s this scene where Evil Oliver is with Evil Kara and with Reverse Flash and she’s supposed to be near death and basically unconscious and then we’re supposed to have this dialogue and she’s supposed to wake up. And we’re deep into the crossover at this point and she uses the opportunity to lay in a state near unconsciousness and fall asleep. And we go wake her up, not wake her up, but say the line that’s supposed to cue her to open her eyes and we realize she is dead asleep. And cameras are rolling.”
Amell went on to explain that while a production assistant rushed on to wake Benoist up, he and Cavanaugh waved the assistant away. Instead, the pair came up with a song about the crossover that Amell sang and woke Benoist up. As Amell noted, cameras were rolling, and the moment is included in blooper reals (it can also be found with a quick search of YouTube — Amell left out that Benoist was snoring). It’s a charming, hilarious moment that definitely makes for a good story.
And with the massive “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover coming this fall, one can’t help but wonder what fun stories will come out of filming that event. “Crisis” is set to be the biggest, most ambitious crossover the Arrowverse has undertaken to date with the massive event spanning five hours (one for each of the Arrowverse shows which will include Batwoman as it debuts this fall) and two quarters — meaning that part of the crossover will air before midseason break and the rest after. With an event that huge, and so given that the fate of the entire multiverse is at stake, the stars will be sure to be spending a lot of long hours on set.
“You think of the scale of it, and what this character means, and him being introduced into the DC TV world, the first person when you think when you think Monitor is you think Anti-Monitor,” LaMonica Garrett, who plays The Monitor, admitted to ComicBook.com before “Elseworlds”. “So, the scale — where’s this going? And then when you think Anti-Monitor, the next thing you think of is “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. So if you keep doing that to yourself, it makes it too much on your shoulders when you are going into it. You have to think about it later. To me, I’m a former athlete. When you think about the big games, the bowl games, you think about the Super Bowl, you think about the World Series, and you ask those players, ‘what does this mean? This is a huge game; this is the biggest game ever.’ And they downplay it. They don’t want to think of it. After the game, they’ll tell you how much pressure they were under, and how much stress. They couldn’t sleep at night. So leading up to it, it’s like they’re trying not to think about that, because if you make that moment bigger than what it is, it’s gonna get the best of you.”
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