Stephen Amell drops bombshell about his 'Suits LA' casting

Stephen Amell, best known for his role in Arrow, landed his Suits LA audition despite never having watched the original legal drama.

Speaking to PEOPLE, the 43-year-old actor shared that he "didn't really know anything" about Suits before he auditioned for the lead role of Ted Black in the new NBC spinoff.

Amell said, "I had seen that famous scene where Harvey [Gabriel Macht] hires Mike [Patrick J. Adams] in the pilot — it just randomly came up on my YouTube feed or Instagram. I don't remember. So I'd seen that.”

The Code 8 star didn’t start watching Suits until he was on set filming the first episode.

"I watched a bunch of the show because pilots are weird. We have a lot of downtime, a lot of long setups and stuff like that. So I'd just go back to my trailer and break off an episode. It was great,” he noted.

Amell admitted that he has learnt to slow down and enjoy each new experience as it happens, and he used that approach for Suits LA.

"I feel very, very grateful for this opportunity. So there is pressure out there, there are expectations, but they're not being placed on us by anyone that we work with or anyone whose — for me personally — opinion really matters,” he highlighted.

Per the NBC synopsis, Amell's character Black is "a former federal prosecutor from New York who has reinvented himself to represent the most powerful clients in Los Angeles."

At the start of the series, his law firm, Black Lane, is "at a crisis point, and in order to survive, [Black] must embrace a role he held in contempt his entire career."

It is pertinent to mention that Suits LA is set to release on February 23, 2025, on NBC and will stream the next day on Peacock.