Paul Blackthorne Departs ARROW Ahead of Upcoming Seventh Season

Paul Blackthorne is departing "Arrow" ahead of the show's upcoming seventh season, Variety has confirmed.

Blackthorne has played Quentin Lance, formerly a detective in the Starling City police department and now deputy mayor, since the show's pilot back in 2012. The exact details of how his character will be written off the show are being kept under wraps.

Blackthorne becomes the latest longtime series regular to depart "Arrow." Previously, Thea Queen actress Willa Holland announced her own exit from the show. But Colton Haynes is returning as a series regular, again playing the role of Roy Harper.

After a violent shipwreck, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) was missing and presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the Pacific. He returned home to Starling City, bent on righting the wrongs of his family and fighting injustice. To do this, he creates the persona of ARROW - a vigilante - and allies himself with former military man John Diggle (David Ramsey) and computer Science expert Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), while keeping his secret from those closest to him.

After three years of denying himself his own life as Oliver Queen in order to be The Arrow, season four opens with Oliver and Felicity enjoying their new life together in suburbia, where she is running Ray's company remotely, after his mysterious death. But their newly tranquil lives are upended when Laurel and Thea arrive to recruit Oliver to save Starling City, now renamed Star City, from an evil new organization, H.I.V.E. Oliver must return to Star City and don the hood once more. But can he keep his aim as The ARROW this time without losing the life he has fought so hard to get back?