“Crisis on Infinite Earths,” the largest and perhaps most eagerly-anticipated Arrowverse crossover event yet, debuts on Sunday night. The event will see The CW DCTV heroes come together in an epic fight for the very fate of the multiverse — a fight that will see an exciting roster of cameo appearances as the event brings their version of the iconic comic book story to life. It will also be the last crossover to include the show that kicked off the Arrowverse, Arrow. The Stephen Amell-starring series ends its run this season and now, as one chapter prepares to close, The Flash star Grant Gustin is reflecting on the very first crossover that saw The Flash and Arrow team up all the way back in 2014 and it sounds like it was very much a learning experience.
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Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Gustin revealed that there were a lot of kinks to work out in terms of his own costume, particularly his mask.
“We blocked it in the daylight, and I remember there’s paparazzi pictures of us blocking it. Stephen is standing in his Arrow show jacket and I’m glued into my mask [looking] so unhappy watching this stunt rehearsal,” Gustin said. “They hadn’t figured out how to do my mask yet. So for the first nine episodes, I was glued in for like 12 hours at a time. Like, I’d eat lunch in my mask.”
The first Arrowverse crossover was “Flash vs. Arrow” and encompassed The Flash season one episode “Flash vs. Arrow” and the Arrow season three episode “The Brave and the Bold”. The crossover saw Team Arrow (Oliver Queen, John Diggle and Felicity Smoak) travel to Central City and help Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) and his team deal with Roy Bivolo who uses his metahuman powers to manipulate people’s emotions as well as Digger Harkness, a boomerang-wielding killer. The episode included a fight sequence in an alley, which is the scene that Grant is describing, but it sounds like his glued-into-his-mask situation got a bit more challenging when it came time to film it thanks to a bit of an emotional time Gustin had reading a script for another episode of The Flash — that season’s “The Man in the Yellow Suit”.
“I don’t remember what the moment was in that script, it’s toward the end. I just remember sitting on the bed in my mask, like needing to go up for that fight scene and I was sobbing because it was so emotional,” Gustin said. “Just my whole mask was getting spongy, and it was terrible. So it wasn’t glamorous that first day of the crossover. I just remember being tired and beat down and mad about being in the mask and excited for the next episode.”
Things have certainly come a long way since that first crossover and fans will get to see just how far with “Crisis on Infinite Earths’. The event will be the most ambitious thing DC has ever attempted in live action, bringing together characters from all six of the current DC Comics adaptations on The CW (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, and Black Lightning), along with characters and actors from the 1990 version of The Flash, the short-lived Birds of Prey, Smallville, Superman Returns, and the iconic 1966 Batman series.
“Crisis on Infinite Earths” kicks off on Sunday, December 8 on Supergirl, runs through a Monday episode of Batwoman and that Tuesday’s episode of The Flash. That will be the midseason cliffhanger, as the shows go on hiatus for the holidays and return on January 14 to finish out the event with the midseason premiere of Arrow and a “special episode” of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which launches as a midseason series this year and so will not have an episode on the air before the Crisis. Black Lightning‘s midseason finale will have a “Crisis” tie-in as well, although unofficially.
