This week is a big one for Arrow , as Barry Allen (played by Grant Gustin) is introduced to the series. Barry, as any DC Comics fan can tell you, is The Flash, and while we’ll meet Barry before he has any powers, The CW have big plans for the character. After he appears in two episodes of Arrow, Gustin will then star in a pilot for The Flash TV series, which could potentially air in the 2014-2015 TV season.

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Grant Gustin as Barry Allen in Arrow.

Speaking about the introduction of the character, Arrow executive producer Andrew Kreisberg said, “Barry comes to Starling City because there's an unexplained robbery at Queen Consolidated and Barry is very interested in the unexplained for reasons we will find out over the course of these two episodes. But he's sort of the opposite of Oliver in a lot of ways. Barry's outgoing and funny and a little bit unsure of himself and smart and sort of a squeaky wheel and the contrast between Stephen [Amell] and Grant is both comical and fun and has been really great to watch.”Gustin was very enthusiastic about playing Barry, noting, “I immediately thought he was really funny and endearing and I hadn't done anything like that and I had a lot of fun with that, just throughout the audition process. They kind of started steering me in that direction immediately, as soon as I met them and I just had fun with it and kind of took it from there.” Gustin, who’s played some less than reputable characters in the past, most notably on Glee, added, “He's likable. I would be his friend. I haven't had the opportunity to play a character I would actually enjoy spending time with so that's nice!”There are some pretty notable sparks on Arrow between Barry and Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) and Kreisberg explained, “It was just something we were talking about when we were figuring out how we were going to bring him in. We spent a lot of time talking about Barry, even before the pilot aspect, just how we were going to introduce him in these episodes. Especially with the way the season had been going, talking about Oliver and Felicity and their growing relationship or feelings for each other, the fact that Barry and Felicity are so similar and they're both a little bit uncomfortable in their own skins and both very likable and personable, it just seemed like they would instantly hit it off, which would complicate things for Oliver even more. It felt like the right way to go. One of the things we did when we were testing some of the finalists was Emily Bett Rickards came down from Canada to read [with them] and the minute we saw her read with Grant, it was a done deal.”

Arrow: Emily Bett Rickards on Barry Allen's Introduction and Felicity's Future

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Executive producer Greg Berlanti couldn’t resist joking, “Yeah, we wanted to make sure he didn't seem like jailbait next to her!” Gustin exclaimed, in reply, “I am older than her!”Yes, Gustin is 23 years old, and he’s also a pretty notably young looking guy. There are some funny lines in Arrow regarding this -- check out the clip above -- with Oliver making a few cracks about Barry's appearance. Kreisberg revealed, “Greg actually had us add a lot of those lines because it is an elephant in the room and so we addressed it. But we always had sort of seen him as being a little bit younger [than Oliver] and the thing that was really important to us more than anything was he really should be a contrast to Oliver and to Stephen. Stephen is the more traditional, square-jawed, muscle-bound hero and that works really well because he needs all that. And one of the things about The Flash is he's a random guy who gets struck by lightning. He needs the bolt of lightning to be a hero in a way that Stephen doesn't need the bolt of lightning.”Collaborating on The Flash pilot with Kreisberg and Berlanti on The Flash pilot is DC Comics’ Geoff Johns, who also co-wrote this week’s episode, “The Scientist”, which introduces Barry. Said Johns, “The cool thing is the contrast. [Oliver] needs the heart, Barry has the heart. [Oliver] has the body, Barry needs the body.”While the Arrow producers know fans have some skepticism about Gustin’s youthful appearance, Berlanti stressed they went with him because they felt he was the right actor for the role. “The tricky thing about casting this role is we were trying to hit a moving target in that if we were just creating a character out of nothing, that nobody had any kind of preconceived awareness of, it would be a lot easier,” said Berlanti. “But this, we knew the character that we were trying to honor and the spirit of the kind of character we were trying to bring to the show. Then we went into casting and we didn’t even have a pilot script. When we cast Arrow, we had a pilot script and you go out to all the actors and everybody reads the whole script. We had sides [script pages]. So really, basically off these sides, we were just looking for someone who was the essence of the character. And in addition, you're looking for someone who fits into the Arrow universe we have but really can potentially have the promise of their own universe and their own show. And had we not found Grant, I'm not sure we would have done the character. We looked at everybody -- certainly the largest search I've ever been a part of for a TV show -- and he just was the part. It suddenly didn’t become about age, it didn't become about any of those other things, other than that, ‘Wow, if I were a kid and I got to watch the living embodiment of The Flash, this is who I'd want to see do it.’ So that's our real hope with these episodes is that when people watch them, even before he's become The Flash, that they connect with him in the way that we did.”

Continue to Page 2 for more on The Flash and the plans for the pilot episode.