‘Arrow’ Finally Gets a Visit From Demon Hunter John Constantine

It’s gonna be one hell of a crossover when demon hunter John Constantine of NBC’s short-lived supernatural drama Constantine pays a visit to The CW’s Arrow. Fittingly, it took an almost otherworldly effort to make it all happen.

“They moved heaven and Earth to get me here,” says Matt Ryan—who starred as the Vertigo Comics character last season—of the one-time deal between DC Comics (Vertigo’s parent company) and Warner Bros. to resurrect Constantine, as it were. “I was starting rehearsals for a play [Thérèse Raquin] with Keira Knightley in New York on the first of September,” Ryan explains. “And originally, where the episode sat in the season, I wouldn’t have been able to do it because of my schedule. But everybody just pulled together and moved some things around and really made it work.”

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Good thing too. Now that Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) has been brought back to life via the Lazarus Pit in Nanda Parbat, the rakish exorcist is probably the only one who can help battle all the demons that come with being reanimated. “There is not much that I can say about the plot,” Ryan hedges, but he does reveal that Constantine ends up in Starling City after being called upon by Oliver (Stephen Amell). “There is a little history between them.… I would not say that they are friends. I would say that they are acquaintances who have a past. John owes him.”

While the details of that debt are being kept hush-hush for now, Ryan will say that Constantine’s interactions with the occult-challenged Team Arrow are priceless. “John knows that there are worlds beyond our world, and he is used to dealing with these things on a day-to-day basis. So bringing him into a scenario with a group of people who have never witnessed anything like this is just fascinating,” Ryan says with a laugh. “And John is an arrogant bugger too, so they are a little bit thrown off by him. You know, he’s the guy who will give the finger to the devil. So you have this arrogant, trench-coat-wearing guy…and Oliver Queen. It’s great!”

Arrow, Wednesday, Nov. 4  8/7c, The CW