As revealed in this week’s episode of The Flash, Deathstorm is a villain unlike any The Flash has faced before. One who can feed off of grief. And for Barry Allen, Iris West-Allen, and their allies, there’s too much of that to go around. How will they take on this new enemy?

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Once again, we had the opportunity to speak with Danielle Nicolet, who plays Cecile Horton, about this week’s episode. We got into what Deathstorm means for Team Flash, how Cecile, who’s an empath, will be affected, and what it’s like working on the action stunts on the show.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is an especially tough time for Team Flash with a villain like Deathstorm that literally feeds off people’s grief. It seems like an especially desperate time for our characters. So I’m curious how this villain affects the seal in particular who is a literal empath and can feel all of this.

Nicolet: She feels most of all. I will, however, say that we will be discovering in this episode why it is Cecile the only member of team last that hasn’t been haunted by Deathstorm yet. There’s a reason for that everyone else has had some figure right like come up from their path, someone who they lost, really been forced to approach their own unprocessed grief. And for some reason, it hasn’t happened to Cecile and it very much has to do with her powers. Because she feels what everybody feels.

Can you tease more about how everyone will be affected by this new enemy?

Well, as we’ve been marching along, each major member of Team Flash has been coming up against some unprocessed grief throughout that comes from their life. And in the bigger picture and how many humans, particularly Deathstorm, sometimes deal with that feelings and emotions are incredibly powerful. And we all know that when we care and pain and grief and suffering along with us through life, it really affects the way we interact with our world. And so imagine a bad guy that can use that that can take up all of that energy and use it to manipulate the people, the places and the things around him that makes for a very, very, very powerful bad guy. And then we’re going to discover pretty soon exactly why it is that he’s coming for us.

How’s it been getting more involved in the action on the show and working with the directors and stunt coordinators?

That’s the funnest part of the job for me. I have a really fun job by anybody’s measure.
Specifically for me, one of the super cool things that have happened with each season that I’ve been on the show is with every season my powers morph and change. We started with me not having powers at all. I knew that when I signed on, but that was going to be something that came about when Cecile got pregnant. But because this will happen in the future episode of the show, we’ve never really narrowed it down yet. The why for Cecile to develop these powers. They have had the room to morph and change them. And that is all leading to a thing, I promise. But so for me as an actor, it’s really really fun because I always have something new to kind of sink my teeth into and explore with each new season. I’m already really excited about where we’re going to go with Season Nine.

Will we get to see more of Cecile’s attorney work, particularly as an attorney for metas as she had previously resolved to do?

We will see a couple more episodes this season where we get to see an attorney mode for the purposes of the story and the show. I think it’s really great because it’s this great opportunity for my character to introduce our guest stars for the episode. Because a lot of times they find themselves in legal hot water and having made that switch on the show where we sort of looked at every metahuman who came on each episode and having Cecile go through this transformation herself. And in turn, kind of letting the team know that like we can’t do that anymore. We have to realize that in each of these studies even some of them get the absolutely bad guys, but like Despero for example. On the face, Despero is a very bad guy. But once you see that, that is there’s a person under there, there’s motive under there. We discovered that he was being a bad guy for all the right reasons, as far as he was concerned.

What’s been one particular arc from this or last season that you really enjoyed doing?

I loved “Armageddon” this season. I felt like “Armageddon” was so well plotted out from the writing perspective. And I felt like each of our characters had such a specific purpose to serve. And I really enjoy playing that. That process of playing that alternate universe where we’ve lost Joe and what feels emotional arc with that was and her going to a place where she realized that she kind of had to be the Joe in the room, but she had to also be a badass at the same time. And that was over those five episodes. Those were so much fun for me to play. I loved having the emotional side and the fighting on the street side of it.

What can you tease for fans as we go into the next few episodes and running up towards the finale?

The last four episodes of Season Eight are a doozy. Everybody is in full effect and we have a huge bad guy situation. That everyone is gonna like it, they’re gonna lose their minds there. We have a couple of visitors coming to the show that the fans are just going to go crazy for. I’m currently about to shoot my very final scene for episode 20 which is our last episode of the season. And 19 and 20 are seriously out of the park. And I say that with those being probably like my 90-something episode on the show. These two episodes are really good.

You can watch The Flash, Wednesdays at 8pm and streaming now on The CW App.