‘The Flash’: Clancy Brown On Rolling Into Central City As General Eiling

Clancy Brown joins “The Flash” family on Tuesday night as General Eiling, who is about to bring the power of the military to Central City.

In Tuesday’s episode, titled “Plastique,” General Eiling brings the army to town after a bomb goes off in downtown (only it’s not a bomb, it’s metahuman Bette Sans Souci). And the new military force in town leaves Detective Joe West (Jesse L. Martin) less than impressed.

“I loved doing that scene with Jesse and Rick [Cosnett] and those guys. That was a lot of fun ’cause you’re right, he just rolls in and he sort of takes over and Jesse can give you this look of ‘What the hell just happened!'” Brown said, when Access Hollywood spoke to him on Monday.

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And in this week’s episode, S.T.A.R. Labs isn’t the only facility that’s been involved (accidentally or on purpose) in altering human DNA. Eiling was involved in a super soldier program.

The Eiling character has a great love of his country, and is expected to dwell in shades of gray, and the complex nature of the role is something the actor was interested in playing.

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“I like the grayness of the character,” Brown said. “It’s like, you know, what freedoms are we willing to give up for our security and all that and… the idea of portraying somebody who you are actually surrendering your security to and making him human and making him flawed and not sort of this ideal that we have around this time of year — that’s interesting to me.”

As the episode unfolds, Brown said fans will see that Eiling has a history with Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh).

“There was a shot in this episode that showed maybe … maybe just one scene in the episode where we saw that Harrison Wells and General Eiling knew each other, and were actually working together at S.T.A.R. Labs, which makes perfect sense of course, because you’re not gonna have bleeding edge science and physics without some kind of military involvement, you know it’s the military science industrial complex after all, this is America. But we see that that is a marriage that had occurred at one time. It’s not current. It’s not a good marriage,” he said.

In fact, with all of Wells’ secrets, all of Harrison’s relationships on the show have proven to be complex.

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“I think maybe hopefully he’s met his match a little bit with Eiling, but there’s a bit of a tai chi contest going on between us. That’s very interesting,” Brown said.

In the episode, the bomb is actually Bette (Kelly Frye), who now is nuclear following the S.T.A.R. Labs explosion, but Brown said there won’t be any flashbacks to her pre-Plastique days.

“I would’ve loved that. Kelly was fun to work with. No, we don’t get to see that unfortunately. It’s Bette with her power and Eiling going after her and Barry showing up and you know, it’s the first season, right? Maybe we’ll come back and we’ll see how it happens,” he said.

Brown didn’t get to catch the excellent “The Flash” pilot before signing on to play Eiling, but he quickly fell for the show’s charm.

“No I didn’t see it before [I said yes to the show], but yeah, it’s pretty impressive. Pretty dog gone good show,” Brown said.

The actor said he feels like television is the perfect place to tell a story like Barry Allen’s.

“I’m kind of a curmudgeon about superhero stuff. I think it lives really well within comic books and animation and strangely enough, I think TV really serves it well in live action. I don’t like the movies, I have to be honest with you. I’ve never fallen in love with superhero movies, not once, ever. Sorry to say, but TV I really like, because TV is TV, and I grew up on the Adam West ‘Batman.’ That was my favorite show of all time and I think you can create a fun world in television that you can come back and visit every week, which I think ‘The Flash’ does. I think it has just enough charm and wit and geekiness and a little bit of camp and angst, but also like this great sort of action pseudo-science stuff,” he said. “It’s really fun. You can’t do what they did back in the ’60s with Batman anymore, but you can update it and you can make it more new millennium. Audiences are more sophisticated and I like the idea of pulling in kind of the lesser known characters, the lesser known heroes and the lesser known villains of the DC Universe and giving ’em life. … [The] big screen has got to be all about the big heroes — the Batmans and the Supermans, but I think you can do justice to Arrow — the Green Arrow — and Flash on television a lot better.”

And speaking of “Arrow,” which features Amanda Waller, Access asked if fans might see a hint dropped about the General’s connection to that character in “The Flash” episode, since the two have connections in the comic book universe.

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“You don’t. I don’t know anything about it so no, you don’t get to see anything about it in this episode of ‘The Flash,'” Brown said.

“The Flash” continues Tuesday night at 8/7c on The CW.

— Jolie Lash