Grant Gustin Talks Playing The Flash Beyond Season 7

The Flash‘s immediate future is currently in a pretty unique predicament, as the COVID-19 pandemic caused production on the show’s sixth season to be shut down. The hit The CW series will be ending Season 6 a few episodes earlier than planned, with the season finale airing next Tuesday, May 12th. Even with a lot of elements – including when and how production will resume on the series – being up in the air due to the pandemic, some are already looking ahead to the series’ future in the years beyond that. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, series star Grant Gustin was asked how much longer he sees himself playing Barry Allen/The Flash. As Gustin put it, he’s hopeful that the series will continue beyond its already-greenlit seventh season, even as that requires renewing his and much of the cast members’ contract.

“Listen, I may never have a job this cool again, that this many people actually tune in to watch, so I’m not gonna take it for granted,” Gustin explained. “I was talking to Michael Rosenbaum the other day and to go as many seasons as they did with Smallville, like, nobody gets to do that! That’s always been something I thought would be really cool to accomplish. It’s not just my decision, obviously, but it has a lot to do with the viewers, and the network, and I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But I can definitely see myself doing more than just the one [season] that I have left on this current contract. Seven [seasons] is it for most of the cast actually, but I think it would be great if we can continue after that.”

This lines up with recent comments that Gustin made on Rosenbaum’s podcast, when he revealed that contract negotiations had begun just before the pandemic.

“The conversations actually had started already for adding a potential eighth and ninth [season], but then this pandemic happened, and everything has stopped,” Gustin revealed. “We don’t know when we’re back, and I don’t know when we’re going to continue the renegotiation talks.”

Either way, it adds an interesting layer over the upcoming seventh season, the narrative of which is already in bizarre footing due to the shutdown.

“Ironically, I’m relieved,” showrunner Eric Wallace recently told ComicBook.com. “I’ll tell you why. When I break the seasons of The Flash, each graphic novel is broken down like a movie, what I think of as my master plan. So, like a good movie, it has an act one, act two, and an act three. Well, the end of this season, because of production stopping, will be the end of act two of our movie, which is a perfect point to break your story because there’s a huge cliffhanger and there’s a hero at his lowest point, but yet now you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“So, it actually was very fortunate for us, even though it was very sad to see production end and not be able to get to what is essentially act three of our movie,” Wallace continued. “When we come back, not only are you presenting the ending in a house on fire, but where we leave this year’s cliffhanger isn’t just an ordinary episode.”

The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.