Riverdale Adds Two New Recurring Cast Members for Final Season

Riverdale is adding to new characters to its cast – just in time for the final season! Nicholas Barash and Karl Walcott have both joined Riverdale Season 7 in “major recurring roles.”

Barash (Bull, Low Tide) will be playing the role of Julien Blossom, whom Deadline describes as “your classic high school red-headed bully. He’s preppy, rich, and extremely entitled. Handsome, athletic, and cocky, he always gets his way, but in the rare times he doesn’t – like with Veronica-he makes life miserable for everyone around him. He often butts heads with his twin sister, but is also an antagonist to all of our teen characters, most especially Archie.”

Meanwhile, Walcott (Moonfall, District 31) will be playing Clay Walker “a teen renaissance man. He is studious, artistic, well-read, and well-traveled. An Army brat, Clay comes from a loving family and is a champion for social justice. He is very open-minded in his art and his sexuality. As he does in the comic books, Clay will have an impactful friendship with fellow queer character Kevin Keller.”

Needless to say, given the track record of Riverdale you can expect these two characters to reveal more complicated dimensions than what’s suggested in their basic outlines. 

What Is Riverdale Season 7 About?

Riverdale’s Final Season is going to take things back to the world of the original Archie comics, with a time jump that essentially reset the series timeline into a 1955 setting. The Archie gang have all been transformed into teenagers again, and only Jughead (Cole Sprouse) remembers the life they lived before. 

“It’s… about our characters finding their way in the constricting, dark realities of the 1950s, trying to discover themselves in a really repressive, conformist, homophobic, racist world,” showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa explained. “The biggest struggle is our characters trying to live authentic individualistic lives during a time period where that was really hard to do.”

“Thank god the ’50s were as crazy as they were because it’s been so fun to be in that world,” he added. “Every season we explore the tropes of a specific genre, be it supernatural, be it pulp, be it crime. This year our genre is the 1950s, so we’re in dialogue with the American myth of what the 1950s were versus the reality.”

Riverdale will return for its seventh and final season sometime in 2023 on The CW.