Supergirl director David Harewood on that new home base and epic 'Eye of the Tiger' moment
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Sunday’s episode of Supergirl, “Back From the Future — Part One.”
The super-friends have a new home base on Supergirl.
Ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths rewrote reality and made Lex Luthor (Jon Cryer) a “good guy” — at least, that’s what the unsuspecting public thinks — in control of the DEO, Kara (Melissa Benoist), Alex (Chyler Leigh), and the rest of the actual good guys have lost their headquarters. The DEO isn’t a safe place for them to congregate anymore. Sure, they still work together to save the day, but without a base of operations they’ve been a little lost.
Thankfully, in Sunday’s episode, “Back From the Future — Part One,” J’onn J’onzz (David Harewood) revealed to the super-friends that he built a secret lair in his office, complete with a hidden elevator. He calls it the Tower, and its purpose is to give everyone an HQ again — like a more local Hall of Justice, right in National City.
“We have a new space to work in and it’s very exciting,” Harewood, who directed the episode, tells EW. “The DEO is no longer ours; it’s Lex’s. That’s his building. Alex and Kara, we can’t just pop into the DEO every five minutes. So it was important for us to create a space where we can operate. J’onn has built this new tower, and hopefully going forward that becomes the new DEO, the space where we all congregate and work out of. It’s a place for the super-friends to work whenever they need it.”
As director of the episode, Harewood laughs about how he was the first to direct and act in the new set. “It was great to be able to introduce that new space and direct in it,” he says, adding that “it was a little challenging, but fun.”
And Harewood can’t wait for fans to see what’s coming next, now that we’re officially in a post-Crisis world, teasing, “Stay tuned!”
“This is a whole new world, and what we’ll see over the next three or four episodes is how that change has affected everybody,” he adds. “There’s some really wonderful stuff coming up. The change does reverberate throughout the rest of the season. We’ll see some interesting things to come. Jesse Rath has some amazing work coming up.”
As for that epic “Eye of the Tiger” needle drop in the big climactic action scene with actual tigers, that was all Harewood.
“As soon as I read [the script], I was like, ‘I’ve gotta do this!’” he says with a laugh. “It was a big challenge. We had to shoot that entire sequence in one day, we had to get creative. I was delighted when they gave me ‘Eye of the Tiger’ because I knew it was just going to be fun. It was a tough day, and we got everything with literally two minutes to spare. We only had that location for one day so I knew I had to crack on, and everyone was brilliant. I’m very proud of it.”
Supergirl airs Sundays on the CW.
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