Green Arrow: All 4 Oliver Queen actors ranked from worst to best

2. Stephen Amell

Arrow took a bit of a different approach to Oliver Queen. The series debuted shortly after the final installment of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy, so the superhero genre was beginning to take a more grounded and gritty approach to the source material. To make that happen, the producers of Arrow gave us a more serious version of, well, everyone (at least in the beginning).

Stephen Amell played the role on the series and he did very well with the unique interpretation. His Oliver Queen bore more similarities to Bruce Wayne than the Oliver we saw in the comics (which was pretty apt as his Green Arrow was more like Batman, too) and Amell was incredibly convincing. The material that he had to work with in those first two seasons was amazing, but it was up to him to convince the audiences watching The CW series at home that changing the character for TV was a risk worth taking. That's exactly what he did.

Amell was a natural at Oliver's playboy billionaire persona, both the real thing in the flashbacks and the more fictionalized version he masqueraded as in the present, nailing the balance between charm and arrogance. And perhaps no version of the character ever had the emotional scars that Arrow's did, and this is where Amell was probably at his strongest, with the first, second, fifth and eighth seasons providing him with plenty of opportunities to showcase all that Oliver had been through.

While this was definitely a more Batman-esque version of the character, Amell convinced audiences that it was a story worth telling.