Meet Gwyn Davies. When DC's Legends of Tomorrow returns for its Season 7 premiere, John Constantine will no longer be part of the team, but actor Matt Ryan will return in an all-new role. According to co-showrunner Phil Klemmer, Gwyn will make Constantine seem like ancient history. He also provided some additional details, including the source of Gwyn's heartbreak, his reason for creating time travel and his connection to Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien.
"Well, I think you're going to be shocked at how quickly you forget Constantine, because Matt Ryan brings such a different energy," Klemmer told CBR. "We started to talk with him about Gwyn -- God, forever, like almost a year ago, because we knew that Constantine was going to end his run. We knew that we didn't want to stop working with Matt. So we came up with this character who we wanted to put as much air as possible between the two, just for his sake and for the audience's."
"So Gwyn is kind of the father of time travel and in this season, he is the Legends' best hope at finding their way back home and being able to escape 1925, where they're trapped. But Constantine is kind of all swagger and devilish charm and Gwyn is really isolated; he's traumatized," he explained. "He's a World War I veteran soldier who -- again, Constantine has all kinds of dark baggage, but Gwyn's, to me is much more. It's not the arch, like, 'Ah! Astra got sucked to Hell, and Desmond --!' Constantine, you're like, 'They all got sucked to hell because of you. You're an arrogant bastard.' Gwyn is just a person who had this terrible heartbreak, terrible misfortune."
"We always seem to come back to Tolkien in the show. Tolkien, for him, like the Shire was the world before the Great War, and our Gwyn saw his bucolic home in Wales and left it with all of his lads and came home a man who is traumatized by the war and no surviving lads in the village and haunted by all the things," he continued. "That's his impetus for time travel, is just wanting to take the world back to a more innocent place."
"Of course, we know that the march of the modern world does not -- the gears do not turn backwards. He's a man who's been -- all of our Legends! Again, they're people for whom the real world doesn't offer any kind of acceptance," he said. "This whole season is about where he finds his place amongst the Legends. But look, he's a guy who's 100 years older, so it's like, even if he makes his peace with them, he's never gonna feel like one of them."
"So it's really interesting to see Matt Ryan like the grandpa of our team, because he sees them all as these modern dilettantes," he added with a laugh. "He doesn't understand why Behrad smokes pot and does yoga. Again, there's some things that he accepts about modern existence, but there's part of him is just a curmudgeon who's just like, 'Meh! It was better back in the day!'"
Ryan has played the role of Constantine off and on since NBC's Constantine series bowed in 2014. The short-lived series was cancelled midway through its debut season, leading fans to campaign for the show's continuation. While the fan campaign ultimately failed, the fervor surrounding Ryan's portrayal of the character led him to be cast in other DCTV projects. In 2015, he made his Arrowverse debut in Arrow Season 4, which paved the way for his involvement on Legends of Tomorrow.
Legends of Tomorrow recruited Constantine in the Season 3 episode "Beebo the God of War." Ryan returned for three more episodes that season before becoming a series regular in Season 4. From Season 4 on, the character enjoyed a prominent role on the show that allowed him to wrap up some of his dangling plot threads from his unfinished Constantine series, including a chance to save Astra Logue. By the time Season 6 wrapped, Constantine had appeared in 50 episodes of Legends of Tomorrow, without counting his involvement in Arrowverse crossover episodes like "Crisis on Infinite Earths."
Legends of Tomorrow returns for Season 7 tonight, Oct. 13 at 8 pm ET/PT on The CW.