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Thea Queen is beautiful, young, rich, and very difficult to get an interview with. It isn't that she guards her privacy—any reader of gossip magazines and web sites can tell you she doesn't—it's that she truly hasn’t wanted to speak seriously about her life.
Thea Queen is also very angry. It’s been said she’s acting out, a typical teenager reacting to a tragedy the scope of which most of us can never truly comprehend. It’s also been said she’s a spoiled ‘celebutante’ picking up where brother Oliver left off.
“Poor little rich girl, right?” She crushes out her cigarette and lights another. She’s been chain smoking since we got here. “What problems could she possibly have?”
What problems indeed.
Five years ago Thea’s father and brother went out for a sail and never came home. Sail of course is perhaps not the right word when describing a yacht such as the one owned by the Queens but since Thea doesn’t want to dwell on the small details then neither shall I.
“They’re dead, okay? They’re dead and it sucks and of course it changed everything.”
Also dead in that boating accident was Sara Lance, daughter of one of Starling City’s boys in blue—or men in plain clothes, as it were—Detective Quentin Lance. It’s rumored Ms. Lance was on-board as Oliver Queen’s overnight guest. What makes that so terribly awkward is that at the time Oliver was seriously dating Ms. Lance’s sister, Laurel.
“Laurel got it. She understood.” Thea is silent for a moment, staring somewhere over my shoulder and likely far into the past. “Nobody should have to understand that, but Laurel did.”
I ask if Laurel Lance is still a large part of Thea’s life and she waves off the question. There is a gulf between them, Ms. Lance working for a legal aid office while Thea attends a competitive private school by day and seemingly every party in Starling City by night. Still, they shared something few of us can ever comprehend and I suspect that’s a bond that is hard to break.
Thea wants to walk and we do, traipsing around the city she knows so well and that is so quick to judge her. She’s animated as she speaks, almost manic, waving her arms expressively and telling me about her night using big, swooping gestures. I realize I’m judging her now and stop.
“I’m not happy,” she says plainly. “I don’t see how I could be. Nobody wants to hear that but it’s true.”
Then why all this, I ask. Why the parties, why this interview?
“Because I’m alive. I’m alive and I have to know it. Feel it.”
I ask if there’s any other way she could do that and she very bluntly says no.
Later that day she invites me to a photo shoot and I accept, curious to see her in a different atmosphere. She’s stunning, but this Thea seems a shadow of the one I spent the morning with. The photographer tries to get her to smile, but she doesn’t, not even the half smile she gave me while we walked Starling City’s streets. The closest she comes is when her mother, Moira, and stepfather, Walter, enter the room and stand quietly behind the photographer. Thea gives them a tiny wiggle of her fingers before receding back into stillness.
She doesn’t talk much during the shoot. She allows herself to be dressed and made-up, posing as she’s told. She appears a beautiful doll and I wonder what she thinks of that.
“Whatever,” she says with a shrug. “I’m what they need me to be.”
And that, I think, might be the key to Thea Queen. She is what everyone needs her to be. She is the scandal-sheets’ favorite subject, the stylist’s mannequin, and she’s the Queen heir. I can’t imagine the pressure she’s under, but at least now I can understand why she needs a release.
“Wouldn’t you?” she asks.
Looking over the photographer’s shoulder, I’m drawn to one particular shot of Thea seated with a mirror at her back. She’s been captured at an angle so she and her reflection appear to be facing different directions. While her reflection looks sadly off into the distance the real Thea stares challengingly into the camera and perhaps past it into those of us viewing her. Can you stare back without flinching? I’m not sure that I can.
Note: As this article went to press Oliver Queen was discovered alive and well, and has returned to Starling City. Robert Queen was not with him. Thea Queen left a voicemail message for me this morning, telling me the news. She seemed calm. Perhaps now she’ll have a chance to learn who she is instead of who she feels she needs to be.