Grant Gustin Teases Reverse Flash’s Upcoming Debut On The Flash

The Flash really hit the ground running when it debuted on the CW this season. We’re only seven episodes in and have already seen a ton of content taken straight from the comics, from Barry Allen’s iconic origin story to various members of his rogue’s gallery, including Gorilla Grodd, Plasitque, Girder and Captain Cold.

The pace will only quicken as the show rockets toward its mid-season finale, “The Man in the Yellow Suit,” which finally pits the Flash against his arch-nemesis and his mother’s killer, Reverse Flash (check out a gallery of behind-the-scenes images showing a brief glimpse of Barry and Reverse Flash’s big confrontation below).

The time-travelling speedster’s debut on the series has been teased since the pilot episode, when we glimpsed a yellow figure amidst the red tornado that causes chaos in Barry’s childhood home and leaves his mother dead and his father wrongfully imprisoned for the crime. That thread continued with last week’s episode, “The Flash is Born,” showing that Joe’s investigation into Barry’s mother’s killer came with a not-so-subtle threat from Reverse Flash himself.

Rick Cosnett may play Eddie Thawne – an obvious nod to RF’s alter-ego Eobard Thawne – but the identity of Reverse Flash has been kept tightly under wraps and will likely be a major mystery that unfolds over the course of the season. In a new interview with EW, series star Grant Gustin, Cosnett and executive producer Andrew Kreisberg talked about Reverse Flash’s debut, and what we can expect from one of the scarlet speedster’s most dangerous adversaries.

Kreisberg promises that the series is “building towards a confrontation between Barry and Reverse Flash,” while Gustin goes into a bit more detail, confirming that the two speedsters will come face to face in the mid-season finale in two weeks:

“Barry will actually come face to face with him, not just running with him, but standing face to face with him, looking at him. He’s vibrating, so he doesn’t know who he is. We don’t see his face. No characters see his face and the audiences doesn’t necessarily see his face either, but Barry gets to hear him say that he killed his mom… We have a huge fight that we shot in the football stadium in Vancouver. That was huge.”

As far as RF’s identity goes, Cosnett was tight-lipped – saying only that, “we don’t want any plotlines getting out before the episode comes out” – but Gustin assures us that it’ll be a big and exciting surprise:

“I didn’t even remotely see coming what Andrew Kreisberg told me is going to be one of the turning points with that storyline. I’ve heard so many theories surrounding Reverse Flash that are all interesting. I was like, ‘Oh, I know what’s going on,’ but literally no one knows what’s going on. Anyone who thinks they know what’s going on is wrong. I’m n the in and I thought I knew, but Andrew told me and I was like, ‘Holy crap.'”