On The Vampire Diaries, Chris Wood played the breakout character “Kai” in the show’s sixth season. Last season, he starred in The CW’s short-lived but excellent binge series Containment. Before he was known for either of those projects, he guested on The Carrie Diaries making Supergirl Wood’s fourth CW show.
Tonight’s episode of Supergirl, “Crossfire,” finds Chris Wood and his character, Mon-El, in some interesting and fun situations including a nerdy makeover courtesy of Kara. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work out too well!) We spoke with Mr. Wood last week as part of our multi-show Vancouver press tour, where our group asked him about joining this show, Mon-El’s perspective, and even an extremely nerdy question or two.
We’ll have some video on the KSiteTV YouTube Channel shortly; since this interview involved tonight’s episode of the show, we felt it best to get it out in text first.
“All the diaries. Supergirl Diaries, Season 3,” Wood joked when reminded of his previous CW credits. “This superhero world is something I haven’t played in yet, so that’s fun. Vampire Diaries is fantasy and, you know, these undead people and werewolves. This is different, though, also all the special effects and just the level of nerdiness that I get to access in myself because I am such a nerd. That’s really fun, because I grew up being a big Batman fan and just loving the DC world. Also, to play a character that’s not up against decades of comparison is kind of nice. We looked at the comics, we talked about it a lot. They sort of had an idea of what the character was. I didn’t have to look at other people’s work and be like ‘I don’t want to do that’ or ‘I don’t want to copy that’. It feels original in that way. I sort of got to just do my own thing. And we did, because in the comics he’s….I feel like he’s really serious. I don’t know if anyone read much of Legion, but he’s super earnest and serious and somber and our version of me is not like that. He gets to be all the ridiculous things that Clark doesn’t really get to be because Clark has too perfect of a moral compass,” he explained before talking a bit about his character development.
“When I first sat down with Greg and Andrew, they told me what we were thinking of keeping for the character and what they were wondering if we could go this direction. They weren’t sure exactly how heightened his powers would be when he got here, where they would go later, sort of what would fit into the storyline. Kara’s development story was sort of skipped in the pilot because in order to get the show up and on the air you have the character who starts here and by the end of the pilot we see she’s a superhero and that’s where we launch the show. We didn’t get to see a whole season of her figuring how to fight and how to perfect those skills. [Here,] you have a guy who has all the same capabilities but he’s sort of like a lame duck version. I think that was their intention with the second season, was having someone go through the hero journey that they couldn’t do with Supergirl because she’s Supergirl,” he said.
As mentioned before, tonight’s episode has some fun scenes between Kara and Mon-El, or “Mike” as he is called as she gets him a job at CatCo. This adventure will bring Kara and Mon-El closer. “The mentor-mentee relationship is sort of how she first opens up to not just hating him because he’s from Daxam, and I think from there, it’s nice that they whatever their differences are sort of fade away, and they find their similarities that they can cling to and they become friends,” Chris told us. “She’s definitely still someone he looks to as an example because she’s got it all figured out. She’s got the same powers which are more honed and developed, and then she also has this great sense of right and wrong which Mon-El doesn’t really understand. He didn’t grow up with that. He wasn’t taught by that exact moral compass, so his journey will be finding his place in that hero universe.”
And finally, KryptonSite’s own Craig Byrne asked the nerdiest question of the Q&A — is there a reason he uses the Kryptonian name of Mon-El rather than his Daxamite name of Lar Gand?
“Every comic book reader was wondering,” Wood laughed. “I don’t know, but we might find out eventually.”
Supergirl “Crossfire” airs tonight (November 7) at 8PM on The CW. Take a look at some official photos from the episode here!