Showrunner Eric Kripke is currently shooting the third season of The Boys, Amazon’s gleefully irreverent satire of all things superhero. It’s a good time for this kind of story, not just because superheroes are everywhere and it’s high time someone mock them, but also because the specific brand of satire on The Boys seems almost eerily well-matched to our current American moment. To wit: in the past bunch of years, we saw far right extremists proudly unite to promote white supremacy, a president attempt to overturn the results of an election, billionaires revealed to pay little to no taxes, and terrorists literally storm the Capitol Building. What could be more appropriate for this time than a show about super-beings with authoritarian leanings teaming up with actual Nazis while in thrall to a merciless mega-corporation?
“I happened to stumble into this great job that had the perfect metaphor for the exact second we’re living in,” Kripke recently told Deadline. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to stumble into something that hits the zeitgeist bullseye, and I don’t take for granted that I finally found one. Part of it is just really relishing this world Garth Ennis created that is about celebrity and authoritarianism, and social media and misinformation, and how corporations present a shiny, happy mask to the world, when what is behind that mask is the most ruthless drive for capital. I got handed this beautifully tailored suit and felt I just had to strut in that as much as I can.”
So far, so good.
The Boys season 3 will dig into American history
And Kripke and team will continue this satiric bent into season 3, which will expand the canvas. “We’ve been certainly a political and satirical show,” he said. “We were really interested in exploring both the recent history of Vought, the company in the show, but also through that the recent history of the United States… We got really interested in the myths we tell ourselves, to feel that we’re righteous, really exploring America itself as a myth.”
"A big element of the comics actually are flashbacks to World War II and Vietnam. I always really loved it because you got to see how the superhero phenomenon didn’t just affect the present, but how it affected parts of the past as well. And so we have this character, Soldier Boy, played by Jensen Ackles, and he’s been around since World War II and was the first Vought superhero. Through him and through his story, we’re able to explore a lot of the history of the country, really.I’d say in previous seasons the boogeyman for you to be scared of used to be, “The terrorists are coming to get you.” And now it’s sort of metastasized into, I think, a much more ominous, “Your neighbor is coming to get you.” And that’s scary to me, how politics are turning us on each other. So, we want to explore what it means to be in America, really."
All of that sounds really interesting, but The Boys isn’t just about big ideas. The team is careful to keep things grounded. “One thing we do, though, probably even more than the comic is we really try to hew to a very ruthlessly logical, grounded place of what would really happen, what would it really look like…if ‘Supes’ were really real, and if you applied the complete fucking absurdity of the superhero myth to the actual world we live in,” Kripke said. “Where those gears grind are funny and strange and absurd. I love living in that sort of deconstructed space, of just simple questions like, if you were The Flash, you would be blowing up people all the time. If you were Superman and you had eye lasers it would not be a cute little puff of white light when it hits you, it would be a horrific evisceration. Exploring all that makes the world feel more credible, but it’s just great fun to break down the superhero myth that way.”
"When I was working with Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] to create the show in the beginning, one of the things we quickly landed at was, everyone will expect us to be shocking and outrageous and gory. So, we said the most surprising and subversive thing we could do is have an incredible amount of emotion and heart and hook people into the characters. That’s the one thing that people weren’t expecting on this show. Part of it was just the nature of, what can we do to really surprise them?We try to give it the psychological focus of an indie film, in the middle of these flying lasers and fights and whatever. We, in the writers’ room, spend 75-percent of the break talking about, “What would that do to them psychologically? And where are they? And what is their level of insecurity at this point, or paranoia?” We spend the vast majority of the time talking about getting inside these characters’ heads. And only then when that’s over, we say, “What does that remind us of politically and satirically that’s happening in the world, that we really want to talk about?” And then only when that’s over and literally in the last week, we’re like, “All right, where’s the exploding whale, or the giant dick, or where’s all the things that go on the front of the cereal box?” But that happens very late, because we try to really make sure our infrastructure is on solid ground."
Why Antony Starr is the perfect actor to play Homelander
It’s clear that Kripke has put into a lot of thought into what this show is and how it should work, but it’s the cast that carries things over the line, and no cast member has broken out more than Antony Starr, who plays the psychopathic Superman parody Homelander.
Apparently, Starr was the only actor they really considered for the role. “hat I really responded to was he had this take on the character from the jump, that was the American hero whose mask is cracking and revealing the sociopathy underneath,” Kripke said. “Just from the jump he had that charming American smile, that almost game show smile down pat, but you could see it in the corners of his eyes that he was very, very dangerous and psychotic.”
"He has such a brilliant way of finding the little boy inside that character too, where you realize what a broken child this massively powerful monster is. And that ultimately, at the end of the day, he just really wants to be loved. That layer just makes that character so tragic, as well as completely terrifying."
It also sounds like Starr is as committed as Kripke, regularly getting annoying at cons when people compliment him on playing such a great villain. “And he’ll say what a good actor should say, which is like, ‘I’m not the villain. How many times do I have to tell you? I’m misunderstood.’ At first I thought it was shtick. And then I realized he really believes that. And that’s what makes a great actor great, that it doesn’t even occur to him that they’re the bad guy, because they’re so deep inside, making that character human.”
Can you imagine Homelander getting mad at you and telling you to stop asking him a question? I think I’d get nervous.
The Boys season 3 will have “the craziest thing anyone’s ever done”
The final piece of the puzzle is all the gross, extreme stuff that goes down on The Boys, which pushes the envelope even in an age when you wouldn’t think it could be pushed any further. “Now, the thing that I do with great glee, pinch myself all the time, I can’t believe we get to do this, are the visuals we pull off, the 12-inch penis, the smashing into a whale broadside, facing-sitting a guy to death. Those are the ones that, for me, I sit in editing with my hands over my head, just giggling,” Kripke said, who worked in buttoned down broadcast TV for years before being released on Amazon.
"Without giving away any spoilers, I was just in editing yesterday, and we’re doing something here in the season 3 premiere that is not only I think the craziest thing we’ve ever done, it’s got to be up there with the craziest thing anyone’s ever done. Maybe it won’t work. Who knows? But I’m just so high on this gag that we’re pulling off. And it’s certainly something nobody has ever seen before, probably for good reason. So all that’s really exciting…Every episode we do really get to show the audience something they’ve probably never seen before. And that’s exciting. How often on a TV show do you get to say that?"
If I wasn’t excited to watch The Boys season 3 already, I am now. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait too far into 2022 to see it.
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