The Flash: Tom Cavanagh & Carlos Valdes Talk H.R. Wells
Now that we know H.R.'s secret, where does this Wells fit into Team Flash moving forward?
This article contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Flash.
At the end of this week’s episode of The Flash, we learn the terrible truth about H.R. Wells: He’s a novelist.
How does Wells’ profession — and the lie that went along with it — affect his relationship with Team Flash moving forward? We chatted with Tom Cavanagh (Wells), Carlos Valdes (Cisco), and Keiynan Lonsdale (Wally) during a set visit earlier this week. Here’s what the S.T.A.R. Labs crew had to say…
“It’s really going to give Tom Cavanagh a lot of play time and has given him a lot of play time so far,” Valdes teased. “You can expect a lot of H.R.’s business and backstory to be rooted in some of this writing of his and specifically the narrative that he’s tackling will reveal itself over upcoming episodes.” Valdes added that because of the face he’s wearing — a face that has betrayed Team Flash before — H.R. has “the cards stacked against him.”
Lonsdale noted that H.R. is “not a Wells that we can easily count on all the time” in terms of science, which makes him quite different from his previous Wellsian counterparts — evil or otherwise.
We’ve yet to learn the identity of H.R.’s partner who solved the mathematical equation Team Flash sent out into the multiverse, but H.R. isn’t the typical scientist Wells Team Flash has come to rely on. This will change the kind of relationship H.R. has with the nerds of S.T.A.R. Labs who are used to often being schooled by Wells in the smarts department. Valdes teased:
This has been a really interesting dynamic to explore with Tom … The dynamic with H.R. is going to be interesting and fun, for sure.
Cavanagh on the lives and lies of Harrison Wells…
For Cavanagh, crafting these many versions of Wells is about finding an element the show is missing and going from there. For example, Harry was “a daily antagonist” in a way the show, which is filled with so many delightful characters, didn’t really have. Where does H.R. fall in Cavanagh’s spectrum of Wells?
In the first season, he seems good but he’s bad. In the second season he seems bad but he’s good. And in this season, well, I wonder what he is? A bit of a con man … But I didn’t want to repeat myself from last year so what I thought I would try this year is a guy who fills it up with comedy, if you will…
We might not be getting a “Wells of the week,” as the montage of Wells replying to Cisco and Caitlin’s multiverse ad suggested, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Cavanagh’s many interpretations of the character. Cavanagh talked about how much of that Wells montage was him and how much was the writers, saying that he sent the producers one of the Wellsian variations we saw. He added:
I’m having a lot of fun with it, but you don’t want to upset the cart or pull the carpet out from what we’re trying to do. You want to actually contribute and have this element — and in this instance it’s a comedic element — you want to make sure that it isn’t disruptive to the story, but it actually aids and abets it … Basically they wrote the roughest schematic and then I went to town. They could have released an entire episode with those four characters.
Hear more of Cavanagh’s response below…
Written by
Kayti is a pop culture writer, editor, and full-time nerd who comes from a working class background. A member of the Television Critics Association, she specializes…