Riverdale Casts Chris Mason In Recurring Role For Season 5

Broadchurch star Chris Mason will recur in the upcoming fifth season of Riverdale in a key role following the show's much-anticipated time jump. The character will appear in the fourth episode of the season, which will air on Wednesday, February 10. That episode will feature the seven-year time-jump, fundamentally changing the chemistry of a show that, up to now, has centered on the high school adventures of Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the Riverdale gang. The actor, who also appeared in Freeform's Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, is set to play a character unlikely to be a favorite with a lot of fans.

Deadline, who broke the story, reports that Mason will play Chad Gekko, characterized as "Veronica's (Camila Mendes) controlling and jealous husband who works on Wall Street. An Alpha dog, Chad is threatened by Veronica's life in Riverdale, especially her friendship with Archie (KJ Apa)."

In addition to Pretty Little Liars and Broadchurch, Mason appeared in USA's Dirty John and HBO Latin America's Aemrican Guest. The role of Gekko was previously played by Reid Prebenda in the Riverdale spinoff Katy Keene. That series took place in the future relative to Riverdale, but Veronica did not appear.

The series is set to not only jump forward a few years, but also to lose some of its "adult" cast, with Skeet Ulrich and Marisol Nichols leaving the series.

"It's funny, we had shot almost two-thirds of episode 20, which was going to be our prom episode. And we looked at that footage and tried to see if there was a way we could cobble together that episode," Aguirre-Sacasa explained back in May. "We actually had shot the prom, where a lot of very dramatic things happen, but we still hadn't shot some big character moments between Archie and Veronica and Betty and Jughead. So we kind of just couldn't do that."

How similar the final product will be to what was planned before COVID is anybody's guess, given that they may want to abbreviate some of the finale in order to set up what's next and what would have been the fifth season.

Riverdale's fifth season premiere, titled "Chapter Seventy-Seven: Climax," will premiere on January 20, 2021, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. The episode sees all hell break loose on prom night, while Betty and Jughead's latest investigation puts them on a crach course with the rest of the Riverdale gang.