Legends of Tomorrow Star Nick Zano Calls the Show “A Really Bizarre Saturday Night Live”

If the mission statements for the Legends is, as Nate Heywood once said, “sometimes, we screw things up for the better,” tonight’s episode will give them a great opportunity to do just that, with Nate in the lead. Dropped into the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Legends find themselves in the midldle of an incredibly sensitive moment, which has proven to be a key event in recent history. If there’s ever a time and place that felt like it called for a scalpel, it’s the missile crisis…but in come the Legends with their chainsaws, ready to go.

It’s an ideal moment in time to look at Nate (Nick Zano), a former historian whose skills as an expert on time aren’t used as often as they could be in the context of a time-travel show. This episode not only puts him in a position to save history, but also throws him together with Zari Tarazi (Tala Ashe), with whom he has a lot of unresolved tension given that a change to the timestream replaced the Zari he was dating, with a new one with a different personality and a thing for John Constantine.

“This was a Phil Klemmer joint, so it’s always nice when the big guy sends something your way,” Zano told ComicBook of tonight’s episode. “It is in Nate’s wheelhouse, of course, like any history buff. I think all history buffs start with JFK, and then you kind of work your way deeper into history. That, for me, was exciting because JFK still feels fresh. Something about it is still very, very relevant, and rarely you get that. So it was fun to play something of such importance in a timely fashion like — which is bizarre to say that, JFK in a timely fashion, but he’s still very relevant. That whole era still is part of us.”

Fans who got a little chuckle out of Nate’s reference to Thor: Ragnarok in a recent episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow may not be shocked to learn that, if there had been more of a time jump at the start of the new season, he might have looked a lot different. According to Zano, he had pitched making an Avengers: Endgame-inspired physical transformation to visually signify everything going on with Nate, who seems to be the recipient of a lot of the misfortune on the show.

“I pitched going into this season — because I grew a beard during the pandemic — I go, ‘Nate should come back full Thor. Like Thor, just let me gain 40 pounds. Let me keep growing this beard. Let me slip into a big depression.’ But the show picks up the same night that the previous season ended.”

Nate’s character has usually been played for laughs, even in the context of a show that’s largely pretty silly. He transitioned form being part of a Booster-and-Beetle style relationship with Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh), to having a similar dynamic with Behrad Tarazi (Shayan Sobhian) after Routh left the series. Whenever one of the numerous tragedies to befall the character has happened, fans have wondered whether he would finally break and lose that positivity. It sounds like, instead, the writers are opting to make the positivity a conscious choice, and give Nate a role that incorporates all that loss without using it as an excuse to go “fill Thor.”

“Nate’s love loss transitions him this season into kind of an emotional caretaker,” Zano explained. “He’s aware of people’s feelings, of what they’re going through, and it’s comes across as like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this. We’re going to get through this and we’re going to get through it together. We’re not breaking. We’re going to get this done.’ That’s sort of where he is. He’s there for his friends, who are in need of a friend. For me, that’s nice, because falling in love, losing love, meeting your grandfather, losing your grandfather, getting your dad back, losing your dad, losing love again. It’s all over the board. So it’s nice to be like, ‘Hey, this is some of the wisdom I gathered from my life.’”

Pairing him with Zari 2.0 may be a little bit of salt in a wound, but it’s one that, on some level, Nate is used to. His first love interest was Amaya Jiwe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), who left the Legends in season 3, only to be replaced by Charlie (Richardson-Sellers again), a shape-shifter who made herself look like Amaya to knock the team off their game, but then got trapped in that form by Constantine.

“That is the most Legends set up you can have,” Zano said. “That’s one of the things about this show — you’re like, ‘Don’t ask.’ In a post-Beebo world, you don’t ask; you just roll with it. They know what they’re doing. You just do your part. But it’s nice that we get to address that at the beginning of this episode. I think we touched on it one more time during the season. But this coming episode is sort of our launching of a new relationship between Zari 2.0 and Nate.”

The oddity of constantly being faced with your ex-girlfriends’ doppelgangers isn’t the only strange thing that faces Nate and the rest of the Waverider crew, of course. Increasingly, part of the show’s premise has been frequent (sometimes weekly) genre shifts, leaving audiences never sure whether any given week will be a riff on Friends or a slasher movie.

“I think all performers, everybody, has a take on something,” Zano said. “This job, this show, it’s like a really bizarre Saturday Night Live, but we do one sketch for an hour. It’s interesting and fun that we get to go, ‘Hey, we’re going all-in on a Western.’ Like, ‘We do a Western now and we can literally do 1950s sci-fi.’ I’m like, ‘All right. This episode is 1950s sci-fi.’ It goes down the list. Sitcoms! We make sitcoms and that cracks me to walk on-set and we’re on a four-camera-sitcom stage. ‘This is what we’re doing.’ So it’s never boring that’s for damn sure.”

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