Casey Jones Will Have Long Hair! Stephen Amell Gives an Amazing Explanation for Why He Doesn't Have Long Hair — Yet

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows has begun its press tour and Arrow star Stephen Amell has come out and explained a major gripe that diehard TMNT fans have been very vocal about since the first official image of Amell's Casey Jones was released.

Casey Jones (throughout every iteration) has always been pictured as a more rough-around-the-edges kind of guy with long greasy hair and at times even a grizzled beard. Amell's Casey Jones has a complete different look than we are used to. Casey Jones in TMNT 2 is clean cut with a nicely shaven head and a neatly trimmed beard. Many fans began to get worried that the character would be too much like Oliver Queen, Amell's character on Arrow.

Screen Rant recently got to sit down with Stephen Amell and asked exactly why Casey Jones looks so different from common iterations:

I think what we got to do with this Casey Jones is we got to give him a little bit of an origin story. He’s a corrections officer. That explains a lot of why he looks different than a lot of the iterations of Casey Jones that we’ve seen before. It wasn’t just, 'We want him to look this way.' It was an actual decision based on the fact that he’s a corrections officer who wants to be a detective in The New York City Police Department, and so he can’t have long, scraggly hair and cutoff sleeves…yet.

Amell's explanation is a great one and should ease the minds of anyone who was worried that this was just going to be Oliver Queen with a hockey mask.

However, while Jones being a corrections officer explains his clean look, it is an alteration from the original origin story. In the original story, Casey Jones saw his father killed by the leader of the Purple Dragon gang, Hun.

This led to Casey Jones having severe emotional disorders and his erratic and angry behavior and the main reason he put on the mask and became a vigilante.

It is a basic origin story that has been done over and over in the superhero genre, which could explain the director's desire to give their own take on the character's origins.

Amell's final word of the quote "yet" does lead us to believe that the creators have plans to bring the more classic look to the franchise. We already know that Stephen Amell is willing to grow out his hair for roles from early seasons of Arrow when Oliver sported longer hair in flashbacks.

At least we got the tease from Amell that Casey Jones will resemble his comic and animated counterpart in future installments of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. So once Casey breaks away from his correctional officer origins I expect him to grow out his hair.