Brandon Routh On DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Teaming Up With Villains And...A Loincloth?

When DC's Legends of Tomorrow debuts tonight, a pair of fan-favorite Arrow characters -- Caity Lotz's Canary (now White Canary) and Brandon Routh's The Atom -- will join Rip Hunter in his timeship The Waverider and travel through time in hopes of stopping the march of immortal dictator Vandal Savage.

Earlier this week, we spoke with Lotz about her role on the series, which launches at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. This time around, we've got a conversation with Brandon Routh, from back in October when we visited the set of Legends of Tomorrow.

You can check it out below -- along with video from our conversation at New York Comic Con.

Ray and Sara both came back from the dead and now they're both joining this team. What's their dynamic going to be like?

It's a little bit yet to be unveiled, I guess. We haven't really had any group scenes. We have little asides to each other, little pieces here and there, but that's a combo that hasn't been established yet. Ray and Sara, Ray and Rip, and Ray and Jax really haven't had too much interaction other than "We've got to do this, we've got to do that." Mission type of stuff. But I'm looking forward to it.

We've seen a picture of you with the Rogues in the bushes. What's the dynamic like for those characters? It seems like a straight-laced character like you could have a lot of fun with that.

Definitely. I'm having a lot of fun with it and the writers are having a lot of fun teaming us up, making a team of us, and you learn a lot. Ray is learning a lot from Captain Cold and Heat Wave about himself about, maybe he doesn't know everything about everything and that there's value in having these guys a part of the team. he kind of understands why Rip would bring these guys along. As I've said, most of the stuff I've had has bee with them, playing the three polar opposites together. It's made fireworks in its own way and fun story stuff: comedy and drama alike.

Would Ray use the time machine to save Anna?

Oh, I think the temptation is certainly there. I think he certainly wouldn't put it past himself to at least think about it and entertain the idea.

Time-travel is a big thing to wrap your head around, even in the world of Arrow and The Flash where lots of extraordinary things happen. How is Ray handling going to all of these different eras and being on the ship and dealing with all these massive changes from his life just a couple of years ago?

He's extremely psyched about it. I think he's the most gung-ho of anybody on this journey. Certainly about the time-travel and the science and how does it work and all this stuff, he and Professor Stein go back and forth theorizing how this is even possible. So he really thinks it's awesome. Because of the nature of the epicness of the journey, that's what really excited him about joining Rip's team. Because they can not only save the world, but save time. Save the future, so it's even bigger. He's all about that, I think.

Is he all-in? Is he giving up his whole life?

Yeah, no homesickness yet, necessarily. I think things that happen throughout the first five episodes make him think about his past and have some nice emotional moments and consider the journey, but not yet. When he goes, he has a solid reason and belief and focus of why he's going on the mission which will be covered in Arrow.

With what he's gone through, getting blown up and brought back from the dead, is his personality different when he comes back on Arrow at all?

Well, he didn't really come back from the dead, he just came back from anybody knowing that he was alive. A little bit different. A certain kind of insanity could certainly ensue from being that way for six months. I don't think so much the journey changed him; it's what he did, and I think he compartmentalizes that experience. But it's what he comes back to — the state of his company, the state of his life, his city. Did he have impact or did he not, I think is his journey. And processing all of that is par to the shift of his being gone and being away and coming back.

I know you had said you were interested in exploring the Sword of the Atom concept. Are we going to see at some point what happened to you in that downtime and how you dealt with being tiny for so long?

There was talk about that. I think that was kind of a wish list thing. Certainly for me it would have been cool, but I don't know if that's going to happen or not. I don't think there's enough worked into the current storyline of Ray in that time for it to work right now. The changes have come mostly from him coming back into the world versus the experiences that he had. And we might come back and play in that world a little bit, or something like that might happen again, certainly. There will be adventures of Ray being small and fighting bugs and other things that seem bigger than life to him at some point down the road and I certainly talk about the Sword of Atom stuff all the time — mostly because I want to have a sword and sword fight in the Atom suit or just as Ray.

I would find it hard to believe that The CW wouldn't want to get you into that loincloth.

[Laughs] Well, I don't know if I'd change the suit, necessarily, or if I would go that far. That would be a long couple of days of shooting, a lot of working out.

Will there be any changes to the Atom suit in the new series?

No changes as of right now. We just made some modifications to the lighting mechanism in the helmet so you can see my face a bit better. But we're early.

What is the interactions like between Ray and Stein? They're both brilliant but they're very different personalities.

There's a little bit of a competition and there's a little bit of a history actually between them, which we find out throughout the course of the first couple of episodes — which, then you understand the back-and-forth. But I think it's a cool relationship that I didn't even think of that they would write that way, but it's pretty fun and there's really good character moments and scenes. And working with Victor was fantastic; I'm enjoying myself.