“Riverdale” Actor Hart Denton on Whether Chic Cooper Could Ever Be Redeemed

If the latest episode of Riverdale left you with more questions than answers, you're not alone: Hart Denton has thoughts, too. A lot of them.

"My gosh, Chic's sitting there and he's talking about how he loved Charles and that they got in a fight here and there...," the actor, who plays the nefarious blond tells Teen Vogue about the big reveal that Chic Cooper and Charles Smith are two very different people — which means that the creepy guy living in Betty's house was never her real brother. "Chic has said so many things that you're like, 'Wait, you just said this, but now you're saying this.'"

"He's got some issues," Hart adds. That concession is putting things lightly; between killing a drug dealer who showed up at the Cooper household, to making an appearance at Riverdale High's production of Carrie: The Musical at exactly the wrong moment, there's plenty of reasons to be mistrustful of Chic. And Hart isn't letting his character off the hook, either: "I want to know how Chic got to where he is, and where he's going to go from here, and what... there's a million different things that I'm trying to piece together about the guy," he says.

The reveal that Chic and Charles are two very different people came after a roller-coaster storyline for the purported new member of the Cooper family. It was only a few episodes ago that Betty submitted Chic's used dental floss for a DNA test that proved he wasn't a member of the Blossom family, and therefore not related to her father, Hal. But that didn't rule out the possibility that Alice Cooper's son could have a different father. As it turns out, he did — Alice admitted to F.P. Jones that she had his baby, and gave the infant up for adoption. The only snag? That baby didn't grow up to be Chic. Charles Smith is already dead, and while Chic says it was due to a Jingle-Jangle overdose, Betty isn't buying it. Oh, and there's a neighbor hinting otherwise.

"I learned about that whenever I got the script, pretty much," Hart says about Riverdale's plot reveal process. "I was getting hints dropped to me here and there from the writers and whatnot, but I didn't really know much about Chic until I got the script. This happens a lot — a lot of answers are given to us, but they keep most things pretty close to the chest." He calls the tactic "both wonderful and challenging," and notes that it helps him stay in character and keep on-screen reactions organic.

So far, he's rolling with the game plan. "Whatever I find out, I find out, and whatever I don't, hopefully they write it in at some point," he explains. But being in the dark means that fans who meet him IRL and ask for intel are out of luck. "They're like, 'Please tell me that there's some redemption with your character,'" he adds with a laugh. So far, no dice — but Hart says that it would have to take an extraordinary act of heroism to absolve Chic at this point.

"I think he would have to save the town in some sense," he says. "It would have to be some heroic element that causes people to go, 'OK, sure, he's been a psychopath, but stack it up next to this.'" (If Hart has his way, too, it's not outside the realm of possibility. "I need to talk to Roberto about that, I think that would be a beautiful thing to do with him," he notes.)

As Hart sees it, "As long as you're not the worst person — which you see at the end of the episode that I'm not that guy — then there's a bit of room for redemption." So who is the worst person, otherwise known as the Black Hood? Betty seems to have figured it out... but not before she turned Chic over to the man who has been manipulating her, and terrorizing the town of Riverdale. And even though she told Chic "Goodbye," fans of the show should know by now that a farewell is hardly ever simple.

"There are going to be a lot of answers about Chic, but I now have a million more questions," Hart reiterates. "I want to put the kid on a lie detector and be like, 'What is real and what is not?' I have enough hope and faith that there's going to be some form of redemption at some point, and we get some goodness out of the guy."

Related: "Riverdale" Actor Emilija Baranac on the Bloody Plot Twist and Saying Goodbye to Midge Klump

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