I really like it when my friends find a new television obsession because it usually means that there will be a trickle-down effect throughout the rest of our friend group shortly thereafter.
If one person starts a show and talks about it enough, inevitably we all will slowly become involved in it too. This is what usually happens with my friend group. But then, there was
Arrow. Instead of a trickle-down effect, the rapid succession with which seemingly all of my friends became involved could be classified as more like a waterfall. One person started a domino effect, and the rest of us soon followed. We were binge-watching the first season on Netflix and falling in love with the characters; we were rooting for Oliver and marveling over the stunt coordination. We all, too, fell in love with Oliver/Felicity as a romantic pairing and bonded over the characters’ growth (both as individuals and a pairing) and certain “shipper” moments.
That’s right, friends and faithful readers. I have a new “ship” and it’s delightful and complex and layered. In essence, it’s everything I desire from a relationship – romantic or platonic – on a television series. There’s no doubt in my mind that Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards have chemistry. They do – just like Joel McHale and Alison Brie, just like Jake Johnson and Zooey Deschanel, just like Gabriel Macht and Sarah Rafferty. Chemistry is so vital in order to truly sell a pairing, but that’s not all that is necessary. What I love about Olicity can really be summed up by what I love about Amell and Rickards as individual actors, just as it can be summed up by all of the actors and actresses I listed previously: they understand their characters. It’s one thing for an actor to play a character. There’s a distinct difference that you feel as an audience member, watching an actor’s dialogue or action in a scene. You don’t feel connected to them and if you do, you don’t feel that the connection runs as deeply as it should. But when Amell and Rickards are on screen together and separately, you get the sense that they just don’t play characters, but that they KNOW their characters.
A decent actor will play a character, like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. You’ll believe them, perhaps, but there will also be a part of you that knows it’s a ruse; that it’s not real. And then there are the good and great actors who you can tell have evolved from playing a character to embodying and becoming that character; they understand what makes their character nervous and afraid, what fills them with joy, what they’re thinking at a particular moment. You can see, in Amell-as-Oliver the intensity and hesitancy and disappointment in himself when Felicity confronts him about Isabel Rochev. And that’s just one example of a moment where you can see that Amell understands his character so deeply that it doesn’t matter if something is written explicitly in a script or not – he just knows Oliver; he knows exactly what he thinks and feels and he acts not as Stephen Amell playing Oliver Queen but AS Oliver Queen. (The exact same thing holds true for Emily Bett Rickards because she just absolutely and completely understands Felicity Smoak and her emotions and motivations for everything and anything.)
So I decided, in the spirit of setting sail on a new “ship” (just roll with the imagery) that I would count down my fifteen favorite Olicity moments before season three’s premiere on October 8th. Join me below the cut and see if your favorite moments made my list!
