Riverdale’s Trevor Stines Explans Why He Wants To Play Nightwing

While fans might know Trevor Stines mostly as Jason Blossom, whose body washed up on the shore of Sweetwater River in the first episode of Riverdale, he’s got his sights on another comic book role down the line, too.

During a visit to the set of Riverdale, Stines remarked that his dream role would be to play Dick Grayson — that’s Nightwing to you and me — in either a TV or live-action film iteration.

Of course, Nightwing hasn’t yet appeared in live-action, and we’ve already seen plenty of people (most notably The Vampire Diaries‘s Steven R. McQueen) lobbying for the gig, so Stines isn’t alone. He is, though, probably one of the best-equipped to explain why he wants the job that we’ve encountered yet.

During a livetweet of this week’s episode, “Chapter 3 – Body Double,” Stines proved his comic book cred during commercial breaks, chatting with ComicBook.com and other comics-friendly news outlets and making observations like how much he loved Tim Seeley’s post-Rebirth run on Nightwing and lamenting the failure-to-launch of the Titans TV series that had been planned for TNT.

“I’ve been a huge comic book fan my entire life. Nightwing always has stuck out to me as a character,” Stines told ComicBook.com after the livetweet. “I love his design, and the character of Dick Grayson has always been an interesting one. Dick Grayson in particular I think has always stuck out to me because he’s the Robin who grew up. He’s the one who worked under Batman, learned everything that Batman had to teach him, but then went off on his own and became a full-fledged superhero outside of Batman’s shadow. I think he’s a great character, and there’s such a great complexity in that relationship with Batman, and in that kind of growth as a person, to take something that someone gave you and to make it your own as a human being as an adult, and to use it to help people.”

So far, fans haven’t seen very much “heroic” out of Jason Blossom on Riverdale. Besides the fact that he’s dead, so the audience sees him only in fleetingmoments in flashbacks and fantasy sequences, there’s the fact that the Blossom family as a whole seems to be pampered and cruel, with Jason implicated this week in a plot by the Riverdale football team to victimize girls at the school.

That isn’t all there is to him, though, and during a conversation with Stines and his co-star/onscreen sister Madelaine Petsch, they got to the heart of what makes their relationship special, and a lot of it boiled down to Jason’s nobility and willingness to protect his sister.

Check back closer to the air date of the next Riverdale for some more of that conversation.

More Riverdale: Yes, Polly really exists! | Who Killed Jason Blossom? | Check out Archie’s comic book collection | Take a Tour of Pop’s Chock’Lit Shoppe

Riverdale airs on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. “Faster, Pussycats! Kill! Kill!” debuts on March 2, 2017.