I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Legends of Tomorrow might be the best of the CW’s superhero shows right now. Each season gets better and better, and an increased emphasis on fun (and less on trying to make the show’s logic or forced romances work) has allowed the series to really come into its own. One of the best things Legends has done is recycle villains from the other Arrow-verse shows, like in last season’s Legion of Doom, and the return now of Damien Darhk (who makes so much more sense on this show than he did on Arrow). In the upcoming “Welcome to the Jungle,” the Waverider team is heading to Vietnam, where they will encounter a creature familiar to Flash fans … Gorilla Grodd.
On the Legends set in Vancouver a few weeks ago, the cast spoke with a group of journalists about what we can expect from the return of Grodd, who is displaced in time. “Ray is the one person who has experience with Grodd — well, he doesn’t really have experience with Grodd, but he knows about him from his friends in Central City,” Brandon Routh told us. “So I think he’s equally amazed, intrigued, and also frightened of what they’re going to do about that problem.”
Maisie Richardson-Sellers revealed that Amaya may have a special connection with Grodd through the power of her totem, and that we may see him in a new light:
“I loved that episode. I had quite an interesting personal relationship with the gorilla in that episode, which was great, obviously, because Amaya speaks to the animals, so they communicate on a whole other level. We see a more tender side to Gorilla Grodd which I think is quite beautiful, actually. I think one thing Legends does really well is that there is no such thing as a villain and a hero. Everyone is flawed and everyone has their positives as well. So we actually see positives to Gorilla Grodd.”
For Tala Ashe, who plays the newcomer Zari, “Zari is just trying to process everything she’s seeing. The telepathic gorilla is a lot. I think she does consider herself a member-isn of the team, so when things like that happen she’s just trying to wrap her head around it and it’s going to take her a while to really be part of them.” But for right now, it’s just “‘Oh, a gorilla. Cool, a talking gorilla. Let’s do a mission.’”
“Gorilla Grodd? Who the hell is that?” Dominic Purcell said in response to our questions about the episode. “Just call it monkey! [What is Rory’s] reaction to the monkey? It’s huge! It’s big, and he’s Rory. You know, he tries to burn the bloody thing.”
But “Welcome to the Jungle” also comes with some emotional moments for Rory. “We get to see some character stuff, some real deep stuff from Rory, and so he’s starting to unwind a little, certainly in this episode,” Purcell told us. “He meets his father, and so there’s beautiful moments there. For me personally, it was a great experience, just doing some emotional work.”
And for those who may be worried about the fate of Caity Lotz’s Sara Lance at the end of the last episode, fear not. “I’m not dead. I made a big thing because they wanted me to have my eyes open at the end like, ‘Oh my God, Sarah is dead.’ I was like “Guys, we’ve done that way too many times,” Lotz said. “So you can sleep well tonight knowing that I’m not dead.”
Legends of Tomorrow airs Tuesday nights on The CW.
