‘Arrow’ season 4 spoilers: Baron Reiter will not be Baron Blitzkrieg on CW series

Well, isn’t this a tad confusing? Earlier today, the news was first announced that actor Jimmy Akingbola had been cast to play on “Arrow” the part of Baron Reiter, a man involved in the criminal organization Shadowspire who in the comic books is more known as Baron Blitzkrieg. Given that most “Arrow” characters who have been cast do go on to become at least some variation of what they are in the source material, it was not crazy to think that this was the plan here with this Baron, as well (who will be around in the flashbacks).

Now, let’s turn to where things start to get a little bit complicated. There was immediate internet confusion out there about the idea of an African-American actor being cast to play a Nazi character on the show. As it turns out, however, this Baron is not going to become Blitzkrieg at all despite what was the easy assumption. Here is the explanation from executive producer Marc Guggenheim to Entertainment Weekly:

“We never planned on actually telling a story about a bad guy who is a Nazi … In fact, when people meet this character, he’s not German, he’s not a Nazi, he doesn’t subscribe to any Nazi philosophies. We were attracted to an organization that actually in the comics had been associated with Deathstroke called Shadowspire. In the comics, Baron Reiter became associated with Shadowspire.”

Guggenheim also added that “if we were, in fact, doing a Nazi being played by an African American, I would expect us to be very duly Internet chastised.” Personally, we don’t really care so much about the show changing things up, mostly because of the sole fact that they have changed things from the comics before that have turned out great.

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