During the movie, some really disgusting things happen on screen The boys, Prime Video’s superhero satire now in its fourth season.
One scene in particular haunts Chace Crawford. He plays the Deep, an Aquaman parody, who in season 3 has an intimate interaction with an octopus that he says is often played by fans at conventions.
“That scene was quite a lot [the worst],” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “I panicked 24 hours before filming and had to make a phone call [showrunner Eric Kripke] and say, ‘Yo, what are we doing here?’”
Kripke brought him back from the proverbial edge and he hasn’t had to film anything personally disturbing since.
“Obviously Eric was right. We had done so many ridiculous things, I was just selfish and worried about myself,” Crawford added. “I just thought about my parents.”
But that was last season – the horrors viewers can witness in season 4 are still unfolding, although rumors suggest there will be something shocking in every episode. Although the TV show is notoriously gory and raunchy for adult audiences, many of the horrors are existential.
In the world of The boys, superheroes are celebrities who, in addition to their godlike abilities, also possess political power. Many of them abuse their talents, but none more so than Homelander, an evil Superman parody played by Anthony 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 where he kills someone and reacts in horror, and then slowly starts to smile and laugh as he realizes that the people around him are applauding his actions. He gloats about literally getting away with murder.
“Honestly, I was frustrated that day because I wasn’t getting as many shots as I wanted… maybe just one or two,” he said. “My conclusion is that everything everyone does to produce this show collectively resonates in pop culture.”
Starr said the great thing about playing such an evil villain is that there are no limitations to what he can do as an actor.
“We’re not tied to anything… on set it’s just play time,” he said.
There are a whole host of new characters present The boys in the final season, including a skeptical government agent 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 in her life, so that’s what she’s looking for,” Heyward said.
The boys has a large online fan community, especially on Reddit. A common concern among fans is that Homelander is so powerful that it seems like no one will be able to defeat him – but some theorize that Sister Sage could be a real threat.
“The show does a great job of elevating Homelander to an untouchable level of power, but that makes him volatile,” Heyward said. “Someone who is aware of possible threats… might feel safe with him.”
Another new superhero is Firecracker, whose superpower appears to be the disappointing ability to generate sparks by snapping her fingers. The actress who portrays her, Valorie Curry, told Yahoo Entertainment that Firecracker’s true power is “intuitively sensing what people need.”
“She can rile up a crowd, but she can also do it in an intimate, one-on-one setting,” Curry said. “It’s creepy. She is very easily underestimated, and most of the time that is in danger for the people.”
Curry added that the character feels very “of the moment” and “remains relevant long afterward.” [they] done taking pictures.”
“I think people will watch the show and see so much of what’s happening now in it, without realizing that the show was written almost two years ago,” she said. “Some of it is prescient, some of it is right on the wrist, and with Firecracker you can’t miss it.”
Although many of the characters in The boys have parallels with comic books, others appear to be parodies of political figures. Kripke has confirmed that Firecracker is a parody of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and that Homelander is a Donald Trump analogue, to name a few.
When the third season of The boys broadcast in 2022, his subreddit fell into chaos. The forum’s rules prohibited discussion of politics, but the show’s storylines became increasingly political.
‘It’s probably nothing 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 who wants to be an authoritarian dictator, and that just happens to be the world we live in.”
Claudia Doumit plays Victoria Neuman, a powerful politician who runs for vice president at the beginning of season 4. 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 election year.
“It’s a pretty bleak political landscape right now, and I think the show brilliantly reflects what’s happening in the world,” Doumit told Yahoo Entertainment. “Sometimes it feels really bad [my character] predicted the future.”
“Some things I say, like speeches or a monologue, come out of my mouth and I think, ‘This is nonsense. This is absurd’. But we hear crazy things like that every day,” she said.
Kripke told Yahoo Entertainment The boys had no intention of looking into the future. “Look, I didn’t predict it, I happen to be leading the show that is most about the current moment,” he said.
Kripke also served as showrunner Supernatural, a CW fantasy series that ran for 15 years. Like it The boys, it had a devoted fan base, for which he is grateful.
“The fans of my shows tend to be very intelligent and passionate, and I’m lucky that they really care,” he said. “If I knew why or how to bottle that, I would. … It makes me want to keep improving my game every time I bat.”
When Kripke spoke to Yahoo Entertainment in May, he said his writers discussed how The boys would end.
“I learned to never say when my show should end because if you go back to recorded history, literally no one else has been more wrong than me in predicting how long their show would last,” he said, referring to how Supernatural would end after the fifth season, but continued for ten more. “Literally no one has been more wrong than me. I have the Guinness [World] File. Afterwards everyone will know, but I’ll keep it to myself.
Kripke announced in June that the fifth season of The boys will be his last. We’ll see if he’s right this time.
The first three episodes of The boys are streaming on Prime Video.
