Emily Bett Rickards Interview: ‘Arrow’ Season 5, Olicity, and Mr. Terrific

Arrow star Emily Bett Rickards
Emily Bett Rickards from ‘Arrow’ at Comic Con 2016 (Photo © Richard Chavez / Showbiz Junkies)

Season five of The CW’s Arrow, the comic book-inspired series that launched The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow, will premiere on October 5, 2016. Cast members from Arrow once again took part in a panel at the San Diego Comic Con followed by roundtable interviews in which they chatted about what viewers can expect from the upcoming season. Sitting down to talk about season five, Emily Bett Rickards (‘Felicity Smoak’) provided the scoop on what’s happening with Felicity and Oliver (played by Stephen Amell) without giving away any spoilers.

Emily Bett Rickards Interview:

Where do we pick up the relationship between Oliver and Felicity?

Emily Bett Rickards: “I do believe that their communication is getting better and I think that that has a lot to do with them being in a new type of relationship past the break-up and having to work together and having a common goal and trying to decide things and trying to improve the city, and not only that themselves and their relationship. So, it’s interesting how we left off with the bunker being destroyed and both just standing strong in a place that they have inevitably destroyed themselves and how their relationship had also been kind of destroyed and broken. How they had done that to themselves and they’re still standing strong I think was a really good example about where they’re going to go because they end up staying in it and they clean it up, and they start moving around each other obviously in a different way. Their dance will be a little different but I think it’s growing.”

Is there still that ongoing element of not being able to fully trust one another?

Emily Bett Rickards: “I feel like they have trust. I feel like they want to think the best of one another and that can sometimes be a problem because you end up finding out how much your boundaries move. I think they’re both very strong-willed and they both have very strong boundaries. It’s trying to figure out where they can let each other back in, so I don’t know if it’s about trust. They both trust they would save each other’s lives, but do they trust each other with their emotions and their heart? That’s different.”

Felicity lost her job at the end of last season. What’s she going to be doing now?

Emily Bett Rickards: “She owns the company, right, because Ray signed it over to her and then she tried to give it back to Ray and he didn’t want it. So, she was CEO of the company and got fired for being CEO. Correct me if I’m wrong – I’ve never been a CEO – I believe that that is possible that she probably still owns the company. So in terms of a day job, we haven’t really seen much of that.”

How will Felicity be helping to ease Curtis into being Mr. Terrific?

Emily Bett Rickards: “Well, I think when Curtis came to Felicity and Oliver being like, ‘Hey, maybe I can be a part of this,’ because that’s easily what he did when he came into the lair last season. And he’s like, ‘I don’t want to be any part of this. I don’t want to do this,’ but this idea of him becoming Mr. Terrific is awesome. He’s going to get in the suit. But it’s sort of him balancing out and finding out what he can do because you don’t go from zero to 100 in being a superhero. You need training. He might have the drive and the goal to go towards it, but you have to have the technical training.”

Watch the full Emily Bett Rickards interview:

(Interview by Fred Topel. Article by Rebecca Murray.)