Cavanagh has stated many times that he enjoys playing Eobard Thawne as the character is interesting, complex, and challenging. When speaking with the Television Academy about playing the character, Cavanagh said: 'The Reverse-Flash has what I like to a call timeless way of speaking. He doesn't use colloquialisms from 2016, he's a little more formal, and he takes joy in destroying people. He has a larger perspective because he comes from 100-plus years in the future and has seen it all. It's easy to play a character like that. He's the arch in arch-villain.' He also sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss his supervillain voice in which he said: "If you're doing it right, you can be charismatic, you can win people over, and you can have so much fun. You build a cage and then you just rattle that cage more than the leading guy can a lot." Kreisberg insisted that Thawne was not evil because his fatherly affection for Cisco was genuine, and "he has a reason for doing what he's doing and he has an agenda and he thinks of himself as the hero... bad people are capable of incredible amounts of kindness and generosity".