Richard Swift has lived a long life, and the next episode of DC's Stargirl will finally offer a glimpse of his sordid past. As promised by the promo for "Summer School: Chapter Ten," the episode delves into what made him The Shade, while the JSA -- or, at least, what's left of it -- continue the battle against Eclipso. But even though he helped Barbara in "Chapter Nine," there may be more to his intentions than meets the eye... and the JSA is about to find out.

Speaking to CBR, Stargirl star Jonathan Cake explained what makes The Shade the perfect character to explore Season 2's themes of moral ambiguity. He broke down the way The Shade's immortality changes the way he approaches problems, as well as why he is constantly at war with himself. He shared his approach to playing a character so ancient and The Shade's attraction to all things "new and novel." He also teased Barbara's connection to his past, the character's "emotional PTSD" and more.

RELATED: Stargirl: Eclipso Found The Secret To Break Courtney Whitmore

CBR: Some superhero roles are secretive to the point that actors don't find out who they're really playing until they show up on set. At what point did you find out you'd be playing The Shade?

Jonathan Cake: Well, it wasn't as late and as exciting as that! I like the idea that people might have a sort of lucky dip with their parts! [laughs] It's just they sort of come along, and you have no idea what you're going to play -- that would be fun.

No, it wasn't like that. I got told that they wanted me to play The Shade... Gosh knows! You know, COVID time/COVID brains have all made everything go a little bit soft, but I guess it was sort of September, or maybe a little earlier than that -- 2020, yes, before we started filming Season 2.

This season really delves into the difference between bad and evil, which is just delicious for a character like The Shade. How would you define those terms, and where do you believe The Shade falls on that scale?

Yeah, I think you're so right. I think one of the things that really distinguishes this show is its interest in moral ambiguity, and particularly in how hard it is to be a morally unpredictable person, and how easy it is to be morally compromised, whoever you are, whether you are technically supposed to be "a hero" or "a villain." There's something that I think is particularly -- or, at least, it seems so to me, because I'm playing him -- particularly delicious in that for The Shade.

As we discover this season, his own moral complexity and the tug of war that exists within him goes very, very, very far back in his life. I think two things are very complicating for him about morality. One is that he's an immortal. I think that feels -- as we know from those wonderful films about being unable to die -- that you have seen behavior, human behavior, repeat itself so many times that you can be forgiven, when you could be forgiven, if one were to be in that situation of behaving badly, of taking advantage of it, of trying to do things for your own personal gain. At the same time, you could also feel like if I'm existing for this long, and I have experienced this level of kind of ennui with the way the world is, then why not try to perform a decent act and do something for other people? So I think this push and pull happens within him all the time.

RELATED: Stargirl: Pat Dugan Just Revealed the JSA's Darkest Secret

He has a wonderful line in this week's episode. He says, as part of the bigger speech, but he said, "I had unspeakable power." I think anyone who has or has had unspeakable power... I think about people in our world today -- we all know who those people are. It's extremely hard to use that purely and ambiguously for good. I don't see an awful lot of moral exemplars who are doing that in our world -- you know, the ones who have unspeakable power. So I think it's really fascinating that Shade is fighting this constant war with himself.

So the other thing that I was going to say that, apart from his immortality, that complicates it is his intelligence. You know, he often sees three or four moves ahead of everybody else, and in which case, sometimes not behaving all that well in the moment might help you behave a little better down the road, but these are, of course, the moral corners that he cuts. To me, he's a really interesting, really complex, really rich character to play. I think his moral ambiguity fit really well into this season's study of, "What do we mean by being good, or bad?"

RELATED: Stargirl Promotes Joel McHale's Starman to Series Regular

How did you set out to embody a being so ancient and so powerful?

Well, I suppose the actor's job is to ask questions and to try to not judge, to try to engage emotionally and intellectually, with what the character is going through. If I had had an extremely complicated family life, if I had emerged from the moral, social and economic murk of Victorian England -- which I'm very interested in and sort of know a reasonable amount about and am fascinated by the literature of -- then how would that make me? What kind of stew would that create, that then could get dropped down into the middle of this Americana, this small town in Nebraska? How would that look? How would this fish out of water behave, particularly one who has traveled the world for 200 plus years and seen so much, so much extremity?

There's a sort of interesting emotional PTSD about him, I think, which I find fascinating simply because that's just the truth of how somebody who is over 200 years old and has gone through the things that they've gone through and had all their close people die -- has outlasted them all. The sense of only being able to be really animated by things that are new and novel and original and therefore interesting to him I think is a really fascinating place to be. The sense of being jaded by life until things come along that feel like something he hasn't quite seen before.

Any part is a sort of act of emotional, imaginative transference, I should say. You're trying to imagine what that brain state could possibly be like, and in doing so, you've already started along the tunnel of inhabiting that person's mind, at least in the way that you imagine it.

RELATED: Stargirl: Dr. Mid-Nite Is the JSA's Best Bet Against Eclipso

The Shade has formed a rather unique relationship with Barbara. What do you think it is about her that draws him to her?

Well, we find out in subsequent episodes what it is that really specifically draws him to her. I'll just say that she has a quality that reminds him of somebody absolutely essential to his life, and someone who reminds him of a type of morality that he has long since abandoned -- or better to say kind of muddied or lost sight of at crucial points in his life. For him, I think Barbara is not only somebody who reminds him of a crucial person in his life, but a kind of touchstone, of kind of innocence, decency, essential kind of spiritual sweetness that he desperately, desperately misses.


Stargirl airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

KEEP READING: Stargirl: John Wesley Shipp Unpacks Jay Garrick's Difficult Decision