Jensen Ackles, Jack Quaid talk getting naked for The Boys

I watch a lot of TV, so sometimes it’s easy to assume I’ve seen it all. And then I watch a show like The Boys and realize I’m a babe in the woods. If you’re watching the new season of Amazon’s superhero satire, you know it’s dedicated to shocking you. There is a scene in the season premiere that…but we’ll get to that. If you saw it, you know.

More recently, the show has trotted out a lot of male butts, which isn’t crazy shocking anymore but is still fairly unexplored territory as far as nudity on TV goes. Jensen Ackles, who plays the World War II-era supe Soldier Boy, was introduced to us naked; our gang of superhero-fighting vigilantes accidentally free him from a Russian prison where he’d been experimented on for decades, and he’s pretty out of it.

Naturally, this was the first scene that Ackles filmed for the season. “What better way to bring a new guy onto the set and then make him take all his clothes off?” Ackles told Entertainment Weekly. “So, yeah, it was a nice intro for me into a completely foreign space with nothing on but a sock.”

Well, a sock and a full forest of facial hair. “I didn’t know that I could grow a beard,” Jensen said. “It became its own thing. I had more products on the bathroom counter for the hair on my face than anything else and it was a little obnoxious. My wife was done with it. She was like ‘Enough with the beard. Can we get rid of that?'”

Hughie’s superpower comes with an “embarrassing” twist

Meanwhile, in the same episode, Hughie (Jack Quaid) decided to follow the lead of Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and take a special dose of Compound V that gives him superpowers for 24 hours. He ends up getting the ability to teleport, with the twist being that whenever he uses that power, he leaves his clothes behind.

“We take every new power and say, what’s the most realistic version of that? And it kept coming up, if he can teleport, if he has an organic power to teleport, how does he bring his clothes along? Like, what is it? How do you do that? So we said, well, he probably wouldn’t,” showrunner Eric Kripke told Variety. “He would probably teleport right out of his clothes because it’s an organic power inside his body. And your clothes going with you would be magical, totally unrealistic. So you have to give Jack all the credit in the world; he saw he was going to be naked for so much of this season and just embraced it and owned it and it plays so funny and real.”

As Quaid pointed out, his power involving nudity is an incredibly appropriate twist of the knife for Hughie. “I was so excited because the kid in me, I’ve always wanted to be a superhero,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to play a character with superpowers. And I actually got to do that this season. And Nightcrawler is actually one of my favorite superheroes, period. So the fact that I got to teleport was such a dream come true.”

"And yes, it does come with a catch that he needs to be naked. But I think that that’s so appropriate for our show and so appropriate for Hughie. Like, he finally gets this amazing power, but it has this really embarrassing twist. Hughie can never just have, like, a straight up win. It’s a lot of half wins… But you know, whatever, I’m a superhero. If I got to be naked to do it, whatever. That’s going to come out sounding weird, but you got it."

Eh, everything on The Boys sounds weird when you say it out loud. You’re good.

The Boys built a giant member for that one scene

For instance, let’s return to that scene from the season premiere I mentioned. Early on, we drop in on a Supe party where an Ant-Man-like superhero shrinks himself down to a tiny size, crawls up his boyfriend’s penis with the intention of giving him sexual pleasure (different strokes for different folks), gets a tickle in his nose because of the cocaine he just snorted, sneezes, involuntarily turns big again, and explodes out the front of the guy’s crotch, leaving him a bloody mess on the bed.

Hello to the imagery, right? And this scene wasn’t just created in post. They actually built a model of a giant penis head, and there’s the Instagram post to prove it.

I guess I should say that now is when you should look away if you don’t want to see something potentially disturbing, but if you’re reading a post about The Boys, it feels like that battle has already been lost, y’know?

Incidentally, there’s an episode airing later this season called “Herogasm.” I don’t even want to think about it.

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