Legends Of Tomorrow's Nick Zano tells us about the perils of having a "very expensive" superpower

DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow is currently rolling straight through its sixth season, which sees the Legends—the least likely, and most consistently fun, of The CW and Greg Berlanti’s various superhero teams—facing off against a horde of aliens who’ve been seeded throughout Earth’s timestream. The team (absent leader Caity Lotz, after her character Sara Lance was abducted in the show’s season 5 finale) has already faced off against evil hamburger sauce and a singing competition with the fate of the Earth hanging in the balance, and tonight’s episode plunges them into an even dicier situation: The Cuban Missile Crisis. Which they’ll attempt to weather with the show’s typically idiosyncratic approach to problem solving, which is far more likely to lean on weed gummies, sports metaphors, and slapstick improvisation than more traditional superhero action.

To address that long-term shift in tone, we talked this week with series star Nick Zano, who joined the Waverider crew at the start of the show’s second season—i.e., the point where it started to get out from under the super-serious shadow of its various parent series. When asked about that shift, Zano pegs (as do we) the Legends’ third and fourth seasons as the pivot point, and cites the season 4 finale, “Hey, World!” as the moment when it fully committed to embracing its comedic side. “I think that was the moment,” Zano said, citing a climax that saw the characters defeat an all-powerful demon while surrounded by minotaurs and Bigfoots, through the power of theme park showmanship, “We all looked around and said, ‘Oh, we’re a comedy. With, like, a ton of heart squeezed in there.’”

As historian Nate Heywood, Zano was originally introduced to the show as an everyman, who didn’t pick up his own superpower—the ability to turn his flesh into steel—for a few episodes. But, as it happens, there are certain perils to being a TV superhero: “Unfortunately, I have been assigned a superpower that’s very expensive to do,” Zano noted, which helps explain why the series frequently seems to avoid having him bust out his powers. “I’ve floated around giving Nate a different superpower on top of his steel, because steel is very, very costly. I don’t know that they factored that in early on, because I don’t think they would have made me steel. They would have made me something else, if they knew long-term cost and usage.” (We asked; Zano understandably says he’s keeping his ideas about potential new powers to himself until he can run them by the show’s producers.)