Here's Why Willa Holland's Thea Queen Was Never Going To Be Killed Off 'Arrow'

By now, you’ve heard that Willa Holland has left Arrow after last night’s episode.

EP Marc Guggenheim is talking about the original star’s exit and how her exit storyline came to be.

While we always knew that Willa‘s character, Thea Queen, wouldn’t be killed off, there were talks of doing just that.

“We talked certainly about the low-hanging fruit of ‘Well, the simplest thing to do is bring Colton back and have her and Roy ride off into the sunset together,’ sort of the way they do at the beginning of the episode,” he shared with EW. “That to me was the obvious choice. That’s the thing that you would expect given the story that we’ve told with Roy and Thea since season 1.”

But it wasn’t the right storyline at all. Not for Thea.

“That was one of the first choices we immediately discounted, because we never wanna do something that’s so patently apparent,” Marc adds. “Killing her off was never on the table. I’ve always been very sincere and consistent in my view that Oliver just can’t lose his last remaining family member. So that was never even on the table.”

Bringing Colton Haynes back into the mix for Willa‘s exit was just what the show was looking for.

“I had bumped into Colton on the Fox lot months earlier and we started talking and he expressed a desire to come back to the show, because he had a window of free time. I was like, ‘Actually, that works out great!’” Marc revealed to TVLine.

He adds, “It worked out really, really well because we always knew that in a perfect world, Thea’s departure from the show would involve Roy in some way. Roy’s been such a big part of her story that [Colton’s return] was a fortuitous circumstance.

TELL JJJ: What do you think of Willa’s departure from the show?