Stephen Amell.Photo:Trae Patton/NBC
Trae Patton/NBC
Stephen Amellnailed hisSuits LAaudition despite having never watched the original show.
The 43-year-old actor tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview that he “didn’t really know anything” aboutSuitsprior to auditioning for the lead role of Ted Black in the new NBC spinoff series.
“I had seen that famous scene where Harvey [Gabriel Macht] hires Mike [Patrick J. Adams] in the pilot — it just randomly it came up on my YouTube feed or Instagram. I don’t remember. So I’d seen that,” he recalls.
It wasn’t until he got on set and began shooting the pilot episode that he finally sat down and dove into someSuitsepisodes. “I watched a bunch of the show because pilots are weird. We have a lot of downtime, a lot of long setups and stuff like that. So I’d just go back to my trailer and break off an episode,” he explains, adding, “It was great.”
Stephen Amell stars in ‘Suits’ as attorney Ted Black.David Astorga/NBC
David Astorga/NBC
According to anNBC synopsis, Amell’s character Ted is “a former federal prosector from New York who has reinvented himself to represent the most powerful clients in Los Angeles.” As the series kicks off, his law firm, Black Lane, is “at a crisis point, and in order to survive, [Ted] must embrace a role he held in contempt his entire career.”
TheArrowstar adds that he has learned over the course of his career to slow down and take time to appreciate each new experience as it’s happening, and he applied that mindset to this project.
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Amell also teased some details about the pilot episode, telling PEOPLE that viewers will be dropped right into the middle of the legal action. And whileSuits LAwill have obvious “parallels” to its predecessor, the series has an entirely new identity of its own.
“You’re really dropped into the middle of this world and things are happening and dynamic professional shifts are happening, and so it has a lot of the same feelings [as the original show], but you’re in a new world, immediately,” he explains. “So hopefully that makes people go back and watch the pilot several times.”
Suits LApremieres Feb. 23 at 9pm ET/PT on NBC and will be available to stream on Peacock the next day.
source: people.com
