Brandon on Originating Ray Palmer, Atom on ARROW

Yahoo! TV had the opportunity to chat with Brandon Routh about his time on the hit CW show ARROW and how he's enjoying bringing to the screen a character, Ray Palmer, never-before depicted in live-action. He also goes into more detail about Palmer's intentions with Felicity Smoak, Queen Consolidated, and the new energy he brings to the show.

How many episodes have you shot so far?
We just finished Episode 9. Christmastime, I think we're on. I'm supposed to be in about 16 episodes, sprinkled throughout the season.

How long before you start getting into some superheroics?
I wish I knew. They're doing a really cool job of a nice, slow rollout. A lot of awesome character development, a lot of fun scenes with Felicity and Ray and Queen Consolidated and a lot of getting the backstory right. Which I appreciate; it helps me really create a layered character in Ray.

But I think we're starting to get to it in the next few episodes. We start to see what Ray is up to, and maybe we — even I — will finally get to have more knowledge about what's going on. Because any good show is secretive even to the actors to make sure we don't spill the beans.

There are a lot of fans who want to see Felicity and Oliver together. Might Felicity and Ray become a thing? And if not, whom would you like to see Ray together with?
We're definitely going down that road. I think that wasn't the intention at all by Ray at the beginning; he just knew that she was the preeminent hacker/computer tech/savvy person that he wanted to target to put on his team, and she already had some interesting ties to Queen Consolidated. That was his intention, but she's pretty amazing, and she starts to catch his eye after a little bit of time. So I think there's room to play there.

As far as anybody else, I don't know. I haven't really actually had much interaction with anybody else in the world, in the show. And Ray brings such a different energy, it's hard to see who he would even be compatible with! Because he's kind of a weirdo. Well, not a weirdo, but a very unique individual.

How different is the DC universe on the TV side of things from the movies?
Well, what I did before was just Superman, no other DC entities present other than Superman villains. Here, we have Arrow and Arsenal and all the various enemies. And we're kind of working now in the same world as Flash. So it's a broader, more expansive, less isolating thing. It's really cool what's happening with the DC universe.

All the shows are on different networks, so I don't think you could ever have crossovers on the other ones, but that would be kind of cool if everyone was everywhere. Plenty of people would like that very much.

Well, if you could hop around anywhere in the DC universe, where would you like to go?
Any other character? Oh, I don't know. I'd want to do something nobody else has touched. That's what's kind of cool about playing Ray Palmer, actually. No one has, aside from a pilot that was shot in the '90s that never really aired. Nobody's really seen a live-action Ray Palmer — the Atom. So I'm kind of getting to do my own thing, tread my own path.

What is Ray Palmer to you? Is there a word or phrase you think of to get into that character?
I guess the one word that comes to mind — maybe a better word is my second word, but I'll use "passionate." Passion as in passion for life. Exuberance — passion and exuberance.

What's come out of what I brought to him — and what the writers have done an awesome job of giving me — is a lot of words. I've found that he just loves everything he does, basically. He dives heavily into it and becomes passionate and exuberant about it and sharing it with people. And that's been a joy for me to be able to express and play that type of character because there's so much comedy and fun that can come out of that; he's always just wheeling and dealing.

It is pretty great seeing you inject that different energy into the show.
It's the opposite of what a lot of people have seen of me before. I'm loving the ability and opportunity to turn people's heads a little bit — hopefully! I had my first dramatic scene in [a previous] episode, which is cool — a challenging shift. We're going to get into the backstory, and I'm looking forward to that even more. Just further development, which is cool, refining the character even more.

And if and when Ray gets into some action stuff... I say I look forward to it now, but when we're shooting it at 3 a.m., I might change my mind!

Source: Yahoo! TV