John Schaech Talks Returning to Legends of Tomorrow's Jonah Hex For "Outlaw Country"

11/17/2016 06:08 pm EST

On tonight's DC's Legends of Tomorrow, the crew of the Waverider heads back to the Old West and Johnathon Schaech returns as Jonah Hex, the outlaw and bounty hunter whose complicated relationship with Rip Hunter was a help to the Legends at one point last year.

It's a different dynamic this time, of course; while Hex steals most of the episode, his relationship with the Legends is strained as he attempts to adjust to somebody else sitting in Rip's Captain's chair.

"It's pretty much his episode," Schaech said. "I think they did that on purpose becuase right after this is when they start to do the [Invasion!] crossover, so I'm kind of helping people ease into their schedule. I had the brunt of the scenes."

For that reason -- and with the addition of Quentin Turnbull (Jeff Fahey), the closest thing Hex has to an arch-nemesis -- there will be those who feel like this is basically the Arrowverse version of the Jonah Hex movie.

(That is to say, the version people won't want to wash out of their eyes with bleach once it's done.)

"It absolutely felt like I'm doing the Legends version of a Jonah Hex movie," Schaech said. "It almost felt like they were gearing up to do a Jonah Hex show. Like, where would they go if they did Jonah Hex? It would be a cowboy series with a lot of action, and they reinvented him a lot [on Legends]."

Along the way, he told ComicBook.com, they reveal -- and in some cases change -- quite a bit about Hex's backstory, giving a different spin on what makes him tick.

"It will change things for a lot of people who love Hex," he said, admitting that he quizzed the producers on whether he thought those changes would alienate fans. They were confident that it wouldn't be a problem, provided the depiction was as good as it was in season 1.

With the crew of the Waverider at hand, how can one Old West outlaw -- no matter how determined or well-armed -- be a problem for Hex and company? Well, it seems Turnbull is looking to upgrade his arsenal.

"Turnbull comes into it, and Hex being the time-traveler that he is in the comics, you can start to see that even Turnbull is affected by the discovery of bigger weapons and new ways to do things," Schaech said. "It definitely set up its own part of the Legends' story."

That gives them an opportunity to play with some of the ideas explored in the cult-classic Hex comic, which saw the gunman walking a scorched Earth using futuristic technology.

Schaech also said that Jonah Hex being a 19th Century "man's man," the character struggled with taking orders from a woman, which gave him a lot of room to play with actress Caity Lotz.

Hex, after all, is unaccustomed to being forced to face his fears and problems, and is more commonly the guy who runs away from them.

"I remember in one comic book he had an opportunity to be a part of this little boy's life and raise him, and have a wife with his mother," Schaech said, "but the mother was like 'you stay away from my boy. You're a bad influence.' It was so crushing to Hex, he was like 'I'm just not dealing with that s--t. I'm not going there.' I relate to him in that way. Now that I have a kid, I have to and I want to [deal with it], but before that I would move so fast away from anything that was real and just deal with what was in front of me instead of what's important."

"And always deal with people who were worse off than me," Scaech added. "That's what Jonah does."

In a team full of lovable losers, what does a gruff, cold, humorless cowboy like Jonah Hex have to offer? What makes him fit in -- and when he does, what makes him different than the rest of the team?

Schaech had a thoughtful answer: "With Jonah, he's always doing the right thing and then he's always getting in trouble. So he leaves his Confederate troop -- and they let him go -- and then when he becomes a prisoner of the Union soldiers, they see the clay on his boots and they realize that all the Confederate troops are holed up in this one riverbed. So they surround them and they take care of the troop, and then Jonah is seen as a traitor, but he didn't do that. It just happened."

...Well, when you put it like that he really does fit right in with the Legends.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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