[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Boys Season 3 finale, “The Instant White-Hot Wild.”]
The Boys just wrapped its most warped season so far with a brutal smackdown between Butcher’s team, Homelander (Antony Starr), and the dad he never knew he’d want to kill, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). Along the way, folks got shot, lost body parts, and generally went HAM on whomever they hated the most.
It was glorious and gory and set up a very strange situation for Season 4. Queen Maeve is presumed dead, Butcher (Karl Urban) is suffering the terminal side-effects of abusing Compound V, Soldier Boy is back on ice, and secretly super-powered politician Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) is now on her way to the White House. Oh, and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) has ditched her costume and joined The Boys permanently. So how did we get here? Let’s have showrunner Eric Kripke explain.
So congratulations, this third season has been out of its mind. Honestly, I need to see the notes you got from Prime Video executives because it was just 11 minutes into the first episode and OH MY GOD.
Eric Kripke: [Laughs] I’m telling you, they’ve been remarkable. They don’t give us restrictions on that stuff. We write it, we say “They are crawling into a giant penis…”
A practical set, right?
Oh yeah, and built at a great expense. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars towards building a massive practical penis. I have the best job. I’ll never have a better job. And [the execs] just laugh along with us and they get it. They think it’s hilarious.
Prime Video
And then you bring in Jensen, your old friend from Supernatural and you give us a version of him we’ve never seen before.
Yeah. That was part of the goal. I mean, I’m obviously a huge fan of Jensen and I know what he can do. His range is so much broader than just that character of Dean, for as much as we had Dean do, right? Charming and funny and scary and emotional, but I just feel like Jensen… Jensen’s just the real deal and we both were excited to give everyone a character that makes them not even think of Dean Winchester at all. And so we talked about it — we even talked about his hair being different. We talked about giving him a beard and making sure his voice was different. He was doing all the things that make Soldier Boy feel like he’s his own person and not Dean Winchester.
His presence led to so much growth for certain characters and also tragedy for certain others. You realize now that The Seven has, like, three left, right?
Yeah. There’s three now. [Laughs] But that’s been our fun running joke. Like, not since episode two of Season 1 has there ever been seven people in The Seven for more than one episode? So I love that. And that was one of the reasons I needed someone with Jensen’s charisma to be Soldier Boy, because that’s a character who’s off camera quite a lot but he’s also the catalyst for almost everything that happens in the season. So you need someone who, even when they’re not on screen, is still controlling the story in a way and you need someone really wildly charismatic.
Amazon Prime Studios
On the flip side, Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) slyly became the romantic heart of the show.
Yes! If you look carefully over all the seasons, they always sort of have been. I think their relationship is so pure and important. Especially with Huey (Jack Quaid) going a little dark-side this year. We do spend a certain amount of time in the writer’s room thinking about what we call our “target of sympathy.” Who’s our target of sympathy? How do we make sure that there’s likable characters in this so that they’re just not all horrible people, right? [Laughs]
I have to say, and this has been an ongoing conversation with friends for weeks, but Antony was next-level this season.
He’s delivering one of the great television villains. And there was no sense of like, changing up his game, particularly this season. It was just him kind of settling into the character a little more after spending a certain amount of time with Homelander. And it’s very collaborative… that scene of where Homelander’s talking to himself in the mirror, for example. We wrote an entirely different scene where, originally, if I remember correctly, the reflection was quite cruel to Homelander from the jump. And it was Antony who called me and we talked about it and he’s like, “What if they’re best friends? What if it’s his only friend?” And I was like, that’s so brilliant. As we evolved it, he said, “I really want to try creating that mirror image to be a totally different character and try like a different voice… I wanna see if we can pull that off.” I was all for it and then you see the results. It’s just amazing to watch.
Prime Video
Agreed! Now, the season was soaked in daddy issues, so is Homelander’s kid Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) now headed off to the spinoff? Is he going to college to become a supe?
[Laughs] No, Ryan will be a big part of Season 4 of The Boys. He’s a little young for college.
He’s a little young for The Boys!
[Laughs] True. Homelander’s kind of keeping him close and one of the big concerns of Season 4 will be which direction is Ryan gonna go. Because there’s pretty major apocalyptic stakes with whatever that choice ends up being made.
Do you know if the season will pick up after the election?
I don’t wanna give any spoilers away, but I’ll just say that the Robert Singer-Victoria Neuman ticket is, I think at the moment, up against the DeSantis-Jordan ticket. And so I think the odds are pretty good that they’re gonna kick their f**king ass.
If people go back and rewatch the season, what Easter eggs should they look for?
Oh, there’s a bunch. One of my favorites is, if you go back to Episode 302, Jazz Sinclair who plays the lead in the spinoff is on the computer screen at the Red River Institute as one of the orphans there. So we dropped a pretty good Easter egg about where she comes from and her backstory. And one that I think is super interesting… in Episode 301, the “Robert Singer for President” has a photo of him as a young soldier in Vietnam and that’s really Jim Beaver. He was a Marine in Vietnam and let us use his picture for that.
I will be speaking with Jared Padalecki in a bit, so now that you have Jim Beaver and Jensen, is there an open invitation for him to do even just do a cameo?
Absolutely open invitation! I would love nothing more than to get Jared on the show. And so, you know, if the schedule works out, I’m all in.
Awesome. Now, after this finale, you really have a lot of wreckage. You’ve pretty much destroyed the tower, Maeve (Dominique McElligott) is presumed dead, half of The Seven is gone, Billy is dying… how do you start to rebuild now?
I think it’s time to bring a couple new superheroes in to The Seven who are going to be much more in-line with Homelander’s madness. He’s gonna stack the deck with much more dangerous heroes than we’ve seen in The Seven up ’til now. I can say that. And you know, our characters are in the position they’re always in, which is that they’re under-gunned and out-manned, but they have each other and they have to figure out how to do it. Butcher has to figure out how to pull it all off before he dies. So yeah, they have a lot on their plates, but you know, it’s always been an underdog story. [Laughs]
The Boys, Season 4, TBA, Prime Video