Cole Sprouse Reflects on 100 Episodes of ‘Riverdale’, and the Show’s “Home Stretch”

On Tuesday, December 14, The CW’s hit Riverdale will celebrate one hundred episodes. And front and center in that celebration is Cole Sprouse’s Jughead Jones. Unlike other members of the cast, Sprouse was already a name actor by the time he joined Riverdale, with hundreds of episodes of Disney Channel shows and network series under his belt. But even with that experience, for Sprouse there was still that sense of uncertainty signing on to the dark Archie Comics reboot.

“It’s lucky, man,” Sprouse told Decider. “We’re actors, so especially when it comes to network television, you sort of sign the contract and you don’t really know how long it can run for, or how people are going to take to the program. But I feel blessed. I mean, I’m not necessarily a religious person, but I feel like we’ve gotten very lucky with this show, and people have stuck around, and it’s had some sort of cultural current that has stayed relatively consistent.”

It’s appropriate that Sprouse is waxing poetic on the eve of “Chapter One Hundred: The Jughead Paradox”. The fifth part of a five part event titled “Rivervale”, which finds the characters that have lived in Riverdale for the past five seasons now trapped in a strange, dark, alternate universe where characters regularly die or turn into supernatural beings, is a tribute to 100 episodes of the series, as well as the Archie Comics source material that spawned the show. In the episode, Jughead starts to realize something is very wrong with their town, and is taken on a wild journey that wraps up the event, while also flashing back to the very first episode, and sees the actors dressed in their iconic comics looks. It’s a lot to take in, but Riverdale is always a lot to take in. And given the hoops the show needed to jump through to even exist, it’s a wonder it got this far.

The development process for Riverdale was even longer and more circuitous than a regular plot of an episode of the series. It started as far back as when future showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa mounted a production called Archie’s Weird Fantasy, featuring the title character realizing he was gay and moving to New York, in 2003. That production was shut down after legal action by Archie Comics, but a decade later Aguirre-Sacasa would write the comics that helped rejuvenate the company, with horror books like Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Around the same time, Aguirre-Sacasa and company began pitching the feature film that would eventually become Riverdale. At times, it involved time travel. Others, Louis C.K. was potentially cast as an older Archie Andrews. It jumped from a feature at Warner Bros., to a TV show at Fox, before it moved to The CW in 2015. A year and change later, the network greenlit a pilot, and on February 9, 2016, Sprouse was announced as playing Jughead, along with Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper. Filming of the pilot occurred in Vancouver throughout March of that year, and after The CW officially picked up the series, season one was filmed starting in September, with the first episode finally hitting the air on January 26, 2017.

“I still will always have a fondness for season one, if I’m being honest,” Sprouse said. “The whole season was finished before the show came out, and so none of us really knew how people were going to receive it. We were just leaning in with no consciousness, just really leaning into what they were given.”

Those early times, as Sprouse tells it, were his favorite on the show. Though he noted that he’ll always be “proud of season one,” it was more about the relationships developed over the course of shooting that will stick with him, versus specific plot points.

“I always get a little bit sappy when we get to this point, but in terms of favorites, when it comes to actual content, those aren’t really the things that I remember,” Sprouse continued. “It’s the moments that we all spent outside of the production, getting closer, or the get togethers that we all had in the earlier seasons when we were all still learning about each other, and learning about the city of Vancouver, and some of us working for the first time on a production of the scale that really stick out to me the most. It’s the people that we met, and the people who left us or continued with us. That’s the stuff that sticks through the most.”

As mentioned earlier, this is far from the first time Sprouse has been on a long-running series. His career started as a baby, switching with his brother Dylan on the sitcom Grace Under Fire, which ran from 1993-1998. A recurring role as Ben Geller on Friends led to an even longer running role of Cody Martin on Disney’s The Suite Life series, spinoffs and crossovers. Though none of those series individually lasted as long as Riverdale, Sprouse did hit 100 episodes with Episode 13 of The Suite Life on Deck, titled “Maddie on Deck”.

“When I was on Disney, we did a lot of episodes, but that was 30 minutes,” Sprouse recalled. “So we were cranking those out a lot quicker, and this has been a long journey, but a beautiful journey, and we’ve all grown up alongside each other and really watched one another grow and creatively spread our wings. So it’s been a really beautiful and powerful experience through all of our twenties.”

As with any marathon, there comes a point when you start thinking less about the sprint, than the finish line, and it seems that’s where Sprouse’s mind is heading as the show films the rest of Season 6, which will return to The CW on March 6, 2022. “I don’t know how much of the show is left,” Sprouse noted. “We’re definitely on the home stretch in terms of, just speaking frankly, contractually, we’re all sort of walking towards the end of those seven years.”

Though contract dealings, by their nature, are not usually public knowledge, an interview with KJ Apa, who plays Archie Andrews, revealed that the star had been contracted for the “next three years” back in March of 2020. That, however, was not directly quoted, so was left unclear exactly whether Apa meant three seasons, three calendar years, three financial years, or otherwise. However, during an Instagram Live chat on November 30, Reinhart seemed to back up this reporting, off-handedly mentioning that while she was hoping for a seventh season of the series, that would “probably be the last one.”

Sprouse, for his part, also seems to confirm that’s where his head is at in terms of finishing the series with Season 7… Though perhaps important to note that Apa, Reinhart and Sprouse are all not producers on the show. It is not out of the realm of possibility for those seven season contracts to be re-upped for an additional year or two, if all parties involved are interested and willing, including the creative staff of Riverdale, Warner Bros. TV, and The CW.

Whenever Riverdale ends, though, Sprouse is hopeful that beyond the memes, and the ‘shippers, and the frenzied Comic-Con signings, the series will be looked at in a very different way.

“I have this funny feeling, like most cult programs, that the show in some years time, when people already know what it is and what it was, that I hope that it has this second life where people can watch it with a more passive perspective and go, ‘Wow, this was really a wild, wild ride.'” Sprouse said. “Most of us have been through the majority of our twenties on this show now, and it’s been beautiful watching all of us grow even as professionals, and seeing where everyone’s career is headed is really beautiful. We did the same thing on The Suite Life, and I’m doing the same thing now.”

Riverdale‘s hundredth episode airs Tuesday, December 14 at 9/8c.

Where to watch Riverdale