Tony Todd Cast As Zoom For Flash, Character Detailed
One of the best parts of Flash was easily the tale of Harrison Wells aka The Reverse Flash. The character was ripe with story and you felt every scene he was in. For Flash Season 2, the villain is going to be another classic Flash villain: Zoom. And now we not only have a definitive detailing of the character, but a name to put to him, for Tony Todd has been cast as Zoom.
“Last year, with the Reverse-Flash, we just modulated Tom Cavanagh’s voice, and this year we wanted to do something a little bit different,” executive producer Andrew Kreisberg tells Variety. “Part of the mystery of the season is who or what is underneath the Zoom outfit, and so we wanted to do something like James Earl Jones as Darth Vader — this iconic voice coming out of this mask. Last year, we thought of the Reverse-Flash as a speed warrior; this year, Zoom is like a speed demon, and no one does demon-voice better than Tony Todd.
“The Zoom outfit is much more organic than the Reverse-Flash suit. In a way, it’s hard to tell if it is a suit or alive… There’s no skin showing, for all you know there’s a robot underneath, or dark energy.”
Describing Zoom’s goals and motivation, Kreisberg says, “For us, the best villains are the ones who don’t have megalomaniacal ‘I want to rule the world’ motivations. Last year, the Reverse-Flash had a very simple goal which was, ‘I just want to go home, and if people need to die or cities need to get wasted for me to get that, so be it.’ And Zoom has a very similar, personal goal this season… simple and easy to understand, and very primal. And just as with Wells last year, Zoom doesn’t care who gets hurt or what gets destroyed in the service of him getting his goal.
“We have to service the entire audience, both the fans and the non-fans, and I think we’ve shown up until this point a great deal of respect and reverence for the source material, so that we always feel like we’re fulfilling the comic book fans’ expectations while also not spoon-feeding them stuff directly from the comics. So the story of Zoom and who and what he is… hopefully comic book fans will be happy because we’ve come up with a clever way to spin the tale, but that also makes it exciting for the people who aren’t as familiar with the comics and are just enjoying the show on its own terms.”
It sounds like a lot of thought and detail went into making Zoom. We’ll see how he appears and resounds with fans when he arrives in the second episode of the season.