Some truly disgusting things happen onscreen during The Boys, Prime Video’s superhero satire that is now airing its fourth season.
One scene haunts Chace Crawford in particular. He plays the Deep, an Aquaman parody, who has an intimate interaction with an octopus in Season 3 that he says is frequently portrayed by fans at conventions.
“That scene was pretty much [the worst],” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “I had a freak-out like 24 hours before filming, where I had to call [showrunner Eric Kripke] and be like, ‘Yo, what are we doing here?’”
Kripke talked him down from the proverbial ledge, and since then, he hasn’t had to film anything as personally unsettling.
“Obviously, Eric was right. We’d already done so many ridiculous things, I was just being selfish and worried about myself,” Crawford added. “I was just thinking about my parents.”
But that was last season — the horrors viewers might behold in Season 4 are still in the process of unfolding, though there’s rumored to be something shocking in every episode. Though the TV show graded for mature audiences is notoriously gory and raunchy, many of its horrors are existential.
In the world of The Boys, superheroes are celebrities who hold political power in addition to their godlike abilities. Many of them abuse their talents, but none more so than Homelander, an evil Superman parody played by Antony Starr.
A GIF of Homelander went viral after Season 3. Starr jokingly told Yahoo Entertainment that it was disappointing because he “doesn’t get paid for any memes.” It came from a scene in which he kills someone and reacts in horror, then slowly begins to smile and laugh as he realizes the people around him are applauding his actions. He rejoices in literally getting away with murder.
“To be honest, I was frustrated that day because I didn’t get as many takes as I wanted … maybe just one or two,” he said. “My takeaway is that, collectively, everything that everyone is doing to produce this show is resonating in pop culture.”
Starr said the great thing about playing such a wicked villain is that there are no constraints on what he can do as an actor.
“We’re not bound to anything … on set, it’s just playtime,” he said.
There are a slew of new characters on The Boys in its latest season, including a skeptical government operative played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and new superhero Sister Sage, played by Susan Heyward.
Heyward told Yahoo Entertainment that her character is “the smartest person in the world,” but that “puts her in a place where she’s not always excited about life or people because she can see everything coming.”
“There’s no spice to her life, so she’s looking for that,” Heyward said.
The Boys has a large online fan community, especially on Reddit. A common concern from fans is that Homelander is so powerful, it doesn’t seem like anyone will be able to defeat him — but some theorize that Sister Sage could be a real threat.
“The show has done a great job of putting Homelander at an untouchable level of power, but because of that, he’s volatile,” Heyward said. “Someone aware of possible threats … might actually feel safe around him.”
Another new superhero is Firecracker, whose superpower appears to be the underwhelming ability to generate sparks by snapping her fingers. The actress who portrays her, Valorie Curry, told Yahoo Entertainment that Firecracker’s true power is “intuiting what people need.”
“She can rile up an audience, but she can also do it in an intimate, one-on-one setting,” Curry said. “It’s uncanny. She’s very easily underestimated, and usually, it’s to people’s peril.”
Curry added that the character feels very “of-the-moment” and “continues to be relevant long after [they] finished shooting.”
“I think people will watch the show and see reflected in it so much of what’s happening right now and not realize that the show was written almost two years ago,” she said. “Some of it is prescient, some of it is right on the pulse, and you can’t miss it with Firecracker.”
Though many of the characters in The Boys have comic-book parallels, others appear to be parodies of political figures. Kripke has confirmed that Firecracker parodies Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Homelander is a Donald Trump analogue, to name a few.
When the third season of The Boys aired in 2022, its subreddit descended into chaos. The forum’s rules banned the discussion of politics, but the show’s storylines became increasingly political.
“It probably isn’t possible to talk about The Boys without talking about politics, and that’s very intentional,” Kripke told Yahoo Entertainment. “The show has always been about … a celebrity that wants to be an authoritarian dictator, and that just happens to be the world we’re living in.”
Claudia Doumit plays Victoria Neuman, a powerful politician who at the beginning of Season 4 is running for vice president. In the past, she confirmed that her character was based on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Doumit knows it’s no coincidence that the show has an election storyline during a real-life election year.
“It’s a pretty bleak political landscape right now, and I think the show does a brilliant job of mirroring what’s out there in the world,” Doumit told Yahoo Entertainment. “Sometimes it very much feels like [my character] predicted the future.”
“Some things I say, like speeches or a monologue, come out of my mouth and I think, ‘This is batshit. This is absurd’. But we hear crazy things like that every day,” she said.
Kripke told Yahoo Entertainment that The Boys didn’t set out to see the future. “Look, I didn’t predict it, I just happen to be running the show that is the most about the current moment,” he said.
Kripke was also showrunner for Supernatural, a CW fantasy series that ran for 15 years. Like The Boys, it had a dedicated fan base, for which he is grateful.
“The fans of my shows tend to be really intelligent and passionate, and I’m fortunate that they really seem to care,” he said. “If I knew why or how to bottle that, I would. … It makes me want to keep upping my game every time I’m at bat.”
When Kripke spoke with Yahoo Entertainment in May, he said his writers were discussing how The Boys would end.
“I have learned to never say when my show should end, because if you go back into recorded history, literally no one else has been more wrong than me about predicting how long their show would go,” he said, referencing how Supernatural was supposed to end after its fifth season, but continued on for 10 more. “Literally no one has been more wrong than me. I’ve got the Guinness [World] Record. Everyone will know in hindsight, but I’m keeping it to myself.
Kripke announced in June that the fifth season of The Boys will be its last. We’ll see if he’s right this time around.
The first three episodes of The Boys are streaming on Prime Video.
