The upcoming Arrow/The Flash spinoff has cast its third mystery hero in British actor Franz Drameh.
Drameh will play Jay Jackson, a former high school athlete whose pro aspirations were cut short by injury. He now works as an auto mechanic but will come to have a “surprising affiliation” with the team at S.T.A.R. Labs.
This casting completes the trio of heroes who have never appeared on television before. The casting call for this role dubbed him “Mystery Warrior” and described him as “[a]n African-American male in his twenties” who “will fill the role of a regular, street smart guy who unexpectedly gains powers, and then, as part of the team, regularly quips about the insanity of the situations.”
Interestingly, Jay Jackson does not seem to be an existing character in the DC Comics universe.
Drameh will join a cast that includes Arthur Darvill (Rip Hunter), Ciara Renée (Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl), Arrow‘s Brandon Routh (Ray Palmer/Atom) and Caity Lotz (Sara Lance/Canary), and The Flash‘s Wentworth Miller (Leonard Snart/Captain Cold), Dominic Purcell (Mick Rory/Heat Wave), and Victor Garber (Dr. Martin Stein/half of Firestorm).
Drameh’s other credits include Edge of Tomorrow, Attack the Block, and Hereafter.
The series, which is officially untitled as of yet, is being described as a “superhero team-up series.” Executive producer Greg Berlanti says that this new project is intended to be “most similar to our crossover episodes, where you feel that ‘event-iness,’ but all the time.”
He added, “For us, first and foremost, with all of [our shows], it’s about ‘how is it its own thing?’ Because we don’t just want to do it to do it.” Berlanti compared Arrow and The Flash “to old Westerns” with the individual shows having “a lot of lone gunmen and sheriffs in town.”
That, then, makes this upcoming spinoff “very much an ode to things like The Magnificent Seven or those great heist pics like Ocean’s Eleven where you get all of those colors at the same time, and a true ensemble, and that was the fun of it.”
There has been some speculation that the working title for the series is Legends of Tomorrow, based on an article about international television sales in Variety and comments referring to “Legends” by David Ramsey (John Diggle) and John Wesley Shipp (Henry Allen) at conventions.