‘Suits LA’: Stephen Amell Talks Major Change Playing Ted Black & Lawyer’s Secret Side

Damian Holbrook February 23, 2025, 10:00 am

Stephen Amell as Ted Black in Suits LA - Season 1 — Joe Pugliese/NBC

Looks like Stephen Amell has hit another bullseye. After eight seasons as superhero archer Oliver Queen on The CW‘s Arrow, the former Green Arrow is playing a straight shooter of a different kind in Suits LA, NBC‘s new California-set spinoff of Suits, the beloved 2011–19 USA Network legal dramedy.

Decked out in Tom Ford rather than Oliver’s leather pants — or the tights he rocked in his passion project, Starz‘s two-season wrestling drama Heels — Amell has risen to the elevated status of Ted Black, a former New York federal prosecutor who’s reinvented himself as an A-list entertainment lawyer. “I’m enjoying the change a lot,” he told our sister publication TV Weekly. “It’s very, very easy to feel like the coolest guy in the room when you’re wearing a bespoke suit that has been tailored within an inch of its life.”

Fittingly, the series itself underwent a few alterations on its way to our screens. After the original Suits — which followed razor-sharp litigator Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), his fake-lawyer protégé Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) and their colleagues (including the now – Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle) at an elite Manhattan firm — blew up on Netflix in 2023, breaking the record for the most streamed program in the U.S., all eyes were on creator Aaron Korsh for a follow-up. What he had, however, was an unrelated show written during the pandemic about Hollywood agents that he was able to retrofit into the original Suits universe… which, ironically, started out as a tale of Wall Street finance bros.

“Making it lawyers instead of investment bankers made [Suits] better,” he declares of his evolving of the idea. “And this show, making them lawyers instead of agents, I also believe made it better.”

Jordin Althaus / NBC

Set within the walls of Black Lane, a chi-chi Los Angeles firm created by Amell’s Ted and his criminal-attorney best pal, Stuart Lane (The Walking Dead‘s Josh McDermitt), Suits LA touts the same dramedy DNA Korsh built into the O.G. series. Only this time, instead of hostile takeovers and international oil-company malfeasance, “most of the people we get to meet are entertainment lawyers,” he explains. Among them: Rick Dodson (One Tree Hill fave Bryan Greenberg) and Erica Rollins (Lex Scott Davis), who are both competing to be the head of entertainment.

But it won’t be all contract negotiations and celebrity clients — although the late John Amos has a cameo in the pilot and Korsh has a slate of guest stars “playing versions of themselves.” Risky business is also on the docket. “In our world, you have a criminal-defense wing and an entertainment-law wing,” says Korsh. “You need to provide a full array of services to your clients, such that if they get in trouble, you can provide criminal defense.”

At what cost? “He’s willing to go far, but he does like to stay within the parameters of the law,” Amell says of Ted, adding that he “is maybe better able to compartmentalize the human element of things.” Still, the actor teases, “this is the world of Suits and of interoffice drama and politics and romance,” so expect the lines between professional and personal to blur. “Behind closed doors, there’s a version of Ted that he does not let anyone see, and that’s, for me personally, the most interesting part of the character.”

Bryan Greenberg as Rick Dodson and Lex Scott Davis as Erica Rollins in Suits LA - "Seven Days a Week and Twice on Sunday"

David Astorga / NBC

That other side of Ted appears early in the pilot, Korsh confirms, when “the imminent death of Ted’s father causes him to behave in a way that comes back to bite him in the ass and throws the trajectory of his present life into a different path.”

'Suits LA' Trailer Introduces Stephen Amell's Ted and Teases Harvey Specter's Return

Much like the original, flashbacks will be used to slowly revisit the rift between Black and his dad, as well as Ted’s origins 15 years earlier in the New York district attorney’s office handling organized crime alongside, yep, Suits‘ Harvey Specter. “He has a connection to Ted in the past, and that will end up resurfacing in the present,” offers Korsh, who has lured Macht into (pun intended) suiting up as Harvey for a recurring role in Season 1. As for other legacy characters, they’ll get a continuance. “I wanted a chance for this show to live on its own,” Korsh says. “If we just end up bringing a parade of old characters back, I don’t think it is helpful for either [show].”

Might say it doesn’t suit them.

Suits LA, Sundays, 9/8c, NBC