Candice Patton Has Filmed Her Final 'The Flash' Scenes
Candice Patton has completed filming on The Flash. As she revealed Friday, the actress had finished her last day of filming on the Arrowverse series with a few sentimental pictures, including her name card and Iris West-Allen's wedding rings that she had worn to the set. "About to shoot my last shot of The Flash," she wrote on Instagram Stories. "There are no words." She posted a video of herself holding back tears after filming the last shot for the series in a later slide. "Fragile AF [right now]," the caption read. "No way to fully process. Just… thank you." As Iris on The Flash, Patton has played the character since the show debuted in 2014. The Arrow spin-off is in its ninth and final season and will air every Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. The series finale will air on Wednesday, May 24. Several familiar Arrowverse characters will appear in the last season of The Flash, including Stephen Amell (as Oliver Queen/Green Arrow), David Ramsey (as John Diggle/Spartan), Keiyan Lonsdale (as Wally West/Kid Flash), and Sendhil Ramamurthy (as Dr. Ramsey Rosso/Bloodwork), all appearing in Episode 9, directed by Danielle Panabaker.
Patton has a complicated relationship with the show, having been critical of how The CW and Warner Bros. neglected to protect her from racist and hateful fans. During an appearance on The Open Up Podcast, Patton revealed that she received a steady stream of online abuse shortly after her debut. The actor said that as a Black woman, she felt "responsibility" for the role and faced "backlash" from fans who "can be racist." Despite playing Iris for eight seasons, Patton said neither the network nor the studio did anything to protect her. "Now people understand how fans can be racist, especially in genre [film and tv], but at the time, it was kind of just like, 'That's how fans are, whatever,'" Patton said. "Even with the companies I was working with, The CW and WB, that was their way of handling it. We know better now. "It's not OK to treat your talent that way, to let them go through abuse and harassment. For me, in 2014, there were no support systems. No one was looking out for that. It was free range to get abused every single day. There were no social media protocols in place to protect me, so they just let all that stuff sit there."
"It's just not enough to make me your lead female and say, 'Look at us, we're so progressive, we checked the box,'" Patton continued. "It's great, but you've put me in the ocean alone around sharks. It's great to be in the ocean, but I can get eaten alive out here. "The star noted that she needs people in positions of power who understand her experience and the experience of Black women and who can say, "OK, she needs protection. "Any time you hire a minority of any kind, you have to be prepared to protect them. In the real world, we are not protected. So just because you put us on a fancy Hollywood set, with the hair and makeup and you assume we're safe, we are not safe." As the harassment worsened while shooting Season 2 of the show, Patton said she contemplated leaving and was "severely unhappy. "I remember being like, 'I can't do this. I'm not going to make it through. I don't want to be here,'" Patton recalled. Still, she remarked that she continued to observe how the network or studio did not protect her, nor was she treated by her co-workers as equally as her white colleagues.
She stated that others in her workplace did not "help" her. "At the time, it was kind of like, 'Yeah, that's how fans are, but whatever,'" Patton said in the episode. The performer also alleged she was initially not followed on Instagram by the official The Flash account. "I remember asking my publicist, I was like, 'Do you think you could get The Flash account to follow me?'" she recounted. "Back when I cared about that s– and wanted to be included." Despite feeling unsupported, Patton said she chose to stay because of contractual obligations and her sense of "huge responsibility," adding, "My fans loved this character." Patton has spoken out about clashing with The CW in the past. In a June 2021 interview with HypeBae, Haley described being "afraid to speak up" when the studio would not reimburse her for using a hair salon in Los Angeles after she couldn't find a suitable one on location in Vancouver. According to the actress, her experience on The Flash has improved over time. She is one of the series' only remaining original cast members, along with Grant Gustin and Danielle Panabaker.
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