The last man standing in The CW’s Arrowverse has now taken his final bow. The Flash, led by Grant Gustin as the titular hero, aired its final episode on Wednesday with a powerful final confrontation against Cobalt Blue, and the return of a few familiar faces.
Gustin wore the speedster’s red suit for a decade – the longest among all Arrowverse heroes – and talked to Deadline about what it felt like to put it on one last time. The last day on set, Gustin revealed, was focused on green screen work as was common practice on the show. “I had just a lot of typical greenscreen work of me running,” the actor said.
The very last scene Gustin filmed, however, was also the one the season, the show, and the entirety of the Arrowverse ended on. Barry, running through Central City, smiling over a job well done.
“The last shot we filmed was actually the last shot of this series of this big, sweeping crane shot that comes down on Barry as he’s running through Central City and a smile comes across his face and that’s where we go out on. That was the very, very last thing we shot, which was pretty cool.”
Most of the scenes Gustin filmed on his last day were solo shots, which meant it was all done in a flash. “It was a really short day actually. I think all of it was like a six-hour day,” the actor said.
Leaving the green screen scenes for last also meant that most of the emotional heavy lifting had already been taken care of the week before, which allowed the actor, whose career first took off with a stint as Glee‘s Sebastian Smythe, to just have fun.
“We did a lot of crying throughout the week as other people wrapped, but the final day was really just me for the most part and we were just kind of joking around all day.”
Gustin kept his composure throughout, and not even the presence of his wife and daughter succeeded in making him cry. “It’ll hit me in waves,” he said, adding that he feels really proud of the work he did across the nine seasons of The Flash – a show which fittingly marked both a new era of expansion for the Arrowverse (to this day the comic book brand’s most cohesive live-action franchise) and its ultimate conclusion.