Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy) teases potential return to The Boys

Jensen Ackles, who played Dean Winchester for over a decade on Supernatural, appeared in the third season of The Boys as Soldier Boy, a World War II-era hero who has not adjusted to our modern notions of propriety. He’s the guy who looks at someone having a nervous breakdown on the battlefield and calls them a wimp…or probably something more colorful; you get the idea.

This is despite the fact that Solder Boy suffers from major post-traumatic stress disorder himself; he’s just not willing to admit it and wouldn’t have the vocabulary to do so if he was. “It wasn’t something that they talked about in his era,” Ackles said on the Awards Radar podcast. “So he just muscled up and just dealt with it. That was something that I think was a really interesting dialogue on what we all currently know as PTSD. And I love the fact that they call it shell shock, you know, that it didn’t really have a name. Much like the term anxiety. That doesn’t exist in his world. He’s like, ‘No, you mean you’re scared.’ And I wanted to bring that kind of gruff, almost uneducated version of it to the character.”

And so he did. And at the end of the season, Soldier Boy was put back into cold storage, there to rest until the story needs him again…which it just might.

Ahead of The Boys season 4, Jensen Ackles reminds us that Soldier Boy “is not dead. Thank God”

So is Jensen Ackles returning as Soldier Boy, either in The Boys season 4 or on the spinoff Gen V? Ackles wouldn’t say, but did drop hints aplenty. “There’s some things out there,” he said. “I’m not allowed to give anything out, but we’ll just say that Soldier Boy is not dead. Thank God.”

That sounds pretty close to a confirmation to me, even if we don’t have any details. The man is technically Homelander’s father, so there’s probably more story to explore there. And if they didn’t have any intention of bringing back Soldier Boy, they would have just killed him right?

Honestly, maybe they should’ve; The Boys has a reputation for being bold and subversive, but the season 3 finale spared the lives of both Soldier Boy and Maeve, which seemed uncharacteristically merciful. But we’ll see what happens when Gen V airs on Amazon Prime Video in the fall of this year. The Boys season 4 will be along some time after.

Jensen Ackles talks acting in “Herogasm,” aka the one with the superhero sex party

We can’t leave this interview behind without getting Ackles’ thoughts on Herogasm, a scene from the third season involving a lot of superheroes gathering for a mass orgy. How do you act in that situation? Quoth Ackles:

"Just keep the blinders on. Don’t pay attention to the threesome, having whatever kind of positional sex that is next to you. You’ve got a mission to do. You’ve got it, and you got to do it. And this is one of the many reasons why the show is just so unique and exceptional is that you can have such a rich layered story within a massive superhero orgy. And it’s like where else are you gonna get that? Bridgerton? Probably not."

Bridgerton, you have your challenge.

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h/t Screenrant