At Northeast Comic Con held in Wilmington, MA I was honored to speak with the nicest and fastest man alive and star of both the original The Flash and supporting star playing Dr. Henry Allen on the current TV show The Flash: John Wesley Shipp!

Graphic Policy: Hi I’m with Graphic Policy and just want to say it’s very nice to meet you.

John Wesley Shipp: Well hi there! Nice to meet you too.

Graphic Policy: I thank you for your time today and I just want to say on a personal note, this is pretty awesome. I grew up with The Flash TV show as a kid and I was back in the dark ages where you weren’t afforded the luxury of great Halloween costumes. (laughs) I wanted to be the Flash so bad I had my mother help make me one. So when I was nine I made the worst Flash costume you’d ever seen but I’m so proud of it today.

John Wesley Shipp: (laughs) Yes but you made it. You didn’t order it. You made it. That’s a good deal.

Graphic Policy: Yes sir. These kids are spoiled today.

John Wesley Shipp: Ha ha.

Graphic Policy: That being aside, I just wanted to pick your brain on a couple subjects. I wanted to get an idea of what does it mean to you to be part of these conventions?

John Wesley Shipp: What it means to me is, it’s an opportunity to represent a show that I’m very proud of and a character that I’ve been associated with for 25 years. It’s also a chance to have an exchange of ideas. When I came to The Flash I was not a comic book guy. I didn’t know a lot about comic books, and even to this day I say, you know the Flash is 75 years old this year. The Flash was 50 years old when I came to The Flash. So there are a lot of people here who know a whole lot more about The Flash and his universe in general than I do. So particularly in the Q and A’s there’s a lot of exchange of ideas and I learn some things. Also I started in theater in New York and I’ve periodically gone back and done theater. I’ll be going to North Carolina to do Twelve Angry Men in a theater there next year, which I think is a great play for an election year. The Hudson Theater in North Carolina, it’s great. In theater you get an immediate reaction, good or bad, you know where you stand. The danger with being in a television studio, is you start acting for each other, and you may be doing things that you think are really cool, but if you’re the only ones that thinks so (laughs) it’s not such a good idea. Now also if you ever want just the affirmation, if you ever feel like what you’re doing doesn’t matter, come to one of these things. Then suddenly you go away like “Okay, yeah that’s why I’m an actor.”

Graphic Policy: It’s got to be an amazing feeling for you, when somebody who wasn’t even born when that show came out but still walks up to you and says “Hey I know you, you’re John Wesley Shipp the original Flash, I know you!” How does that resonate?

John Wesley Shipp: Well first of all when they started calling me the “original” Flash it was mind-blowing. It was whoa, wait a minute because the Flash as I say was 50 years old when I came to it, but of course I understand what they mean is that I’m first who’s portrayed the role live action on television. So I used to just sort of shake my head and kind of laugh at the idea that I would be the original anything. Now I just own it. I own it because there’s somebody to pass it off to. That makes me feel the history now that there is someone to pass it off to, and it’s somebody who’s doing such a wonderful job in the character.

Graphic Policy: So true. I think the role you have on that show is just as important as well. It shows lineage, look at how they have Mark Hamill back as The Trickster. It’s just absolutely cool the way they’ve built upon this. Now that it’s cross promotional, since the two shows are going to be forever linked and Grant Gustin does such a great job with you. How does it feel to be back in the clubhouse again?

John Wesley Shipp: Grant does do such a wonderful job. When I saw that the CW had brought the original show onto the scene where all the original episodes are streaming now on CW Seed, you can stream them for free and to promote that, they had taken a scene from the new show where Grant’s (Barry) is in his crime lab looking at a computer screen and they superimposed me as The Flash saying “Come join Grant Gustin watching the original Flash” that just really says it’s pretty cool.

Graphic Policy: It’s tremendously cool and I’m a huge fan of both incarnations of the show. Tell me how besides technology obviously, has it changed the filming process between the original show and today’s version, is there any practices that are totally different? 

John Wesley Shipp: Good question. I would have to answer that with, its possible now. What I mean is that we were coming in trying to do that kind of show, pioneering some special effects, some of the effects I found out when we recently had a 25th anniversary celebration in Los Angeles and Mark (Hamill) was there and Joyce Heiser, Andrew Kreisberg from the new show came, we had the people from the technical departments, I discovered that some of the effects that we were pioneering then are being used now on the new show when it comes to representing the Flash’s speed. The difference is they can do so much more in CGI now, it becomes possible to do the show that we wanted to do in 1990. We were the most expensive show that Warner Bros. had every done for television, and we were consistently behind our air dates and over budget in order to get the quality that we got. We were 9 days per episode, two units shooting simultaneously. I often would be shuttled back and forth between units and now they shoot the show in 8 days. They have a longer post production, but what that does for them and what that gives them is the room to focus on character relationships. They particularly laid that in the first season as Barry (Grant) was getting his powers and learning how to deal with that psychologically as he was trying to implement them in a way to exonerate his father, and all of these things.

Graphic Policy: That to me is the best part about the new Flash show, is that it’s a constant father/son dynamic in most of the characters. You’ve got a father/son dynamic in Barry and Henry, one in Barry and Joe, even one in Dr. Wells to an extent. What is your take on this approach?

John Wesley Shipp: Well that’s a rich one and I’ve been fortunate enough to play that relationship from many different angles. I was “psycho dad” on Teen Wolf, I mean rarely was there a more reprehensible figure, I can barely watch it. Now I’m like “Wherever you got that from John, put it back in the box and let it stay there…”

Graphic Policy: (laughs) Yeah no doubt.

John Wesley Shipp: That is a loaded relationship and it certainly has a lot of resonance. I was lucky enough to be on Dawson’s Creek where Kevin Williamson really got that relationship and wrote it in a unique and special way. Henry Allen, now I mean was there ever a better dad under extreme circumstances than the way they are writing Henry? I love the scenes between Grant (Gustin) and myself and it does make me feel like that show 25 years ago meant something, in our scenes. You know, Grant knows I was the Flash, I know what he’s going through. We have a built-in dynamic, it’s as if I’m a father who was playing football and now you have a son that’s playing football we would have that to share, that’s built into our relationship and to Grant’s and my relationship. That was more particularly at the beginning. Not so much now as he’s come into his own. Anytime you start something there’s an air of tentativeness. “Will it be successful?” Especially when you’re dealing with someone who did it before, even though it only went one season but 25 years later it still has a tremendous following. So there was some of his tentativeness to make his way into it, wondering “Do I really have to kill myself in order to play this character well?” People don’t realize it’s a tremendous job to play a costumed character let alone The Flash. You have the creature in the suit, then you have Barry so you’re really playing two parts. Just watching him deal with it with the grace of a champion has been such a delightful and meaningful process for me.

Graphic Policy: It’s just so awesome to hear you speak so positively about it. Do you have a favorite performance or episode in either series, one that really sticks out with you?

John Wesley Shipp: In the 1990’s show I loved the “Nightshade” episodes. I loved the dynamic for the same reason. I got to play the other side of the mentor/protegé relationship with Jason Bernard. I certainly loved that. Also any time working with Mark (Hamill) was a trip, because he was so over the moon about playing the character and committed to it. For him to give that performance in 1990, no holds barred, no self-consciousness, balls to the walls performance that he gave, again in 1990, remember we were coming into television against the backdrop of the Batman (Classic) TV series, which I was a huge fan of when I was a kid. However there was a huge camp element to it and we were trying to sort of reinvent for television the way the Batman (1989) movie for film, we were trying to change the way superheroes were told on TV. I had a reticence I never wanted to speak in the suit. I only wanted to show pieces of it, shot at dark and at night, because I was a little self-conscious about being turned into a mascot against that backdrop. Now Mark, being a huge comic book fan he was like “Bring it!” “Show me the unitard” and he was off to the races. So that sensibility is now what I see in Grant. Grant wears that suit like a second skin, because it’s now 25 years later and there has been so many projects that have grounded comics, in my opinion where they belong in reality and in truth what are these issues that we are trying to get to, in this Pop Art medium. We even took the Flash to even darker than the Flash is, we had to in order to difference from all the lightness that had been up to at that time. Now Grant jumps and leaps and spins and sings and talks he’s as comfortable in the suit as he is out of it. It’s a wonderful thing to see.

Graphic Policy: You can just tell that all you guys and the cast are having a fun time on the show. It’s just really well done. It almost sometimes especially when you and Grant are on screen, it doesn’t even seem like acting. It seems like there is such a natural relationship there, and it’s obvious there’s a bond and it bleeds over into the product we see.

John Wesley Shipp: Sure sometimes it overlaps, and that’s when I think acting gets really interesting. When they needed to, at the beginning of this season (2) when Henry got out. They had to find a way, because I had no interest in sitting around onscreen in my underwear on the sofa eating a pizza and being like “Well you going to the crimelab today Barry?”  I’m not interested, particularly since I’ve played The Flash, ever being seen that way and it would be incredibly boring for me. So the problem was “How to we get Henry off, so we could bring him back when we need him?” That scene was rewritten at least seven or eight times. Andrew (Kreisberg) and I talked about it on the phone, and he said every time they wrote it in the writer’s room and they read it, someone would go “Really?” One time it was that Henry wanted to see the world because Nora, got to see the world and I didn’t. My thing if I was going to get away with leaving, the first episode I’m out of jail and not be stoned by the audience it’s got to be some version of Henry believes it’s the best thing for Barry at this time. Given the fact that the whole episode is about how Barry hurts the one’s he loves, or those closest to him, he’s having a hard time being a superhero because everyone close to him is at risk. Bless his heart, the minute his dad gets out of jail, he throws all that over and we’re going to be roommates and we’re going to have pizza night and I’m ready to go to the movies etc. Henry is wise enough to step back and go, and it was a statement the way it was written, he says “You can’t be what you need to be with me here.” So I came up with the idea of, what if I ask him? What if I hope he says yes? So I turned it into “Do you think that you can be all you are becoming with me here?” At the same time hoping he says yes. He doesn’t say yes, he hesitates and points out that Henry is the only family he has left. Then Henry knows what he has to do and the response becomes “Well that’s not really true, don’t you have another family in this room?” Of course he’s referring to Joe and Iris. So it was something of a shock when one reason I wanted to have them ask that question because Henry and Barry became Old Flash and New Flash. Could he (New Flash) become everything that he is becoming with me here, Old Flash looking over your shoulder? Subtext.

Graphic Policy: Wow. Deeply layered.

John Wesley Shipp: So that’s what I love when with the audience, you can bring the history in and they question who are they seeing here? Are they seeing John and Grant, are they seeing Old Flash, New Flash, are they seeing Henry and Barry or are they seeing ideally, some combination of the three?

Graphic Policy: Definitely gives so much more depth to these characters. I like that they are using you sparingly, because it would be such a cheap trick if they have you around in the episode doing nothing but saying “Hey come on over to the house today.” I’m up to the mid-season finale which is coming in a few days, but are you going to be used in the second half of this season?

John Wesley Shipp: I will.

Graphic Policy: Terrific. Is there anything you can tease?

John Wesley Shipp: Nothing unfortunately. I learned my lesson. In the first season I was in Cape Girardo Comic Con and someone was taping a Q and A and I had just come from the set and everyone was talking about Legends (of Tomorrow) the new series. I referenced it casually and next thing my google alert started blowing up saying “Did John Wesley Shipp just inadvertantly reveal the name of new series?”

Graphic Policy: Jeez. God bless nerds and the 24 hour news cycle.

John Wesley Shipp: So my publicist from WB when I was working on Dawson’s Creek, said to me “Uh John could you cool it, we haven’t divulged the name of the new series yet.” So now when asked I just go “la la la la la la” and that’s that.

Graphic Policy: Well I just want to thank you for your time again. You went well above and beyond what I expected. It was a pleasure.

John Wesley Shipp: Well thank you.

 

*A phenomenal person and great experience. Always cool to meet someone you looked up to as a kid, but it’s even better when they turn out to be everything you thought they would be. Please make sure to follow John on Twitter @JohnWesleyShipp and all of you check out The Flash on the CW which airs on Tuesday nights at 8PM. I’m personally hoping he’s on the mid season finale. Gotta run!