Arrow Guest Star Robert Knepper Talks Creating The Clock King, "Making It My Own"

Tonight's episode of Arrow, which starts in less than ten minutes on the East Coast, sees Team Arrow facing off against The Clock King. Played by Heroes and Prison Break alum Robert Knepper, the character has been set up as a kind of opposite number for Felicity, both understanding and--at least once--besting her at her skills as an intelligence-gathering and computer-hacking member of the team. The whole thing had to be shot in one day, Knepper told MTV News, because of the nature of both his schedule and the show's--and he still hasn't met series star Stephen Amell, with whom he does not share screen time (instead, he does battle with Black Canary and Felicity Smoak).

Asked about his approach to the character, though, and how much he made up on the fly versus how true he wanted to be to the source material, Knepper was thoughtful. "My wife had the foresight to Google the character," Knepper said. "And boom, boom, boom, all these images come up of this DC character, and I went, 'Wow, you can go so many different directions with this guy.' And I said, 'Okay, I have to make it my own.' " The actor revealed that he called Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim to ask for input, and Guggenheim encouraged him to take some ownership of the character and not be paralyzed by fan reactions. "I called him up and said, 'So when you put these characters in there, do they come from the written character already, the DC character? Or do you make them up?" Knepper said. "How much do you apply what's really there in the history, and how much do you elaborate on your own?' And he said, 'Generally we create a character and then go looking for a [similar DC Comics] character and see if they exist.'" That's certainly an interesting note in the grand scheme of things--although obviously there are certain characters, especially the season-long big bads, who are imported from the comics somewhat more faithfully and who are done so specifically because the showrunners want to depict Deathstroke or Merlyn. The Clock King almost feels like he has shades of The Calculator--which is ironic since he was the arch-nemesis of Oracle, to whom Felicity is often compared. Knepper concluded, "What we ended up doing was a nice mixture of the comics, what was written before for Clock King, and them letting us go."