‘The Boys’ creator, cast break down series finale, look back on legacy

In crafting the final season, which finds Homelander demanding to be worshiped as God, the writers drew inspiration from the actions of current and former fascist leaders. What they did not anticipate was, as Kripke puts it, “the world out-crazying us.” To cite just one example, President Trump recently posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as a deity, and a golden statue of him was just unveiled at a Miami golf club.

After worrying that Homelander’s delusions of becoming a religious figurehead were too far-fetched, Kripke came to see that storyline “as a metaphor for the ultimate level of narcissism.” “Trump legitimately sees himself as that, even though he won’t admit it,” Kripke says. “So I was like, ‘Well, at least we don’t have to worry about people thinking it’s too outlandish.’”

Without an outlet to channel his frustrations, Kripke says his heart now “sinks” every time he reads a news story that feels ripped from “The Boys.” Not only is the rise of autocratic leaders “objectively bad for the world,” he adds, but the feeling that the show “didn’t go far enough” is also “unsettling,” to put it lightly.

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Still, at a time when fear of retaliation has created a chilling effect across Hollywood, Kripke — guided by a Mel Brooks-inspired philosophy that satire should never pull its punches — appears unfazed by the threat of backlash from the real White House.

“It’s hard to fathom that you’re watching the exploding d— and driving through whales, and you’re like, ‘Wow, this really feels threatening to us in any political way,’” Kripke says. “What makes this country great is we can make this kind of satire and we can do funny s—. The ‘South Park’ guys can be out there saying anything they want to say, and that’s something that we should all hold really dear.”

Although he believes that there are “different corners of this particular world” that can be fleshed out in future spinoffs, Kripke always knew that the original series would end with the “slow collision” of Homelander and Butcher. “We’re getting out right when the going’s good, and it was time to finally bring those forces together definitively,” Kripke says. The writers have paralleled Homelander’s “slow descent into madness” with Butcher’s escalating anti-Supe crusade. While Homelander amasses power, Butcher thirsts for revenge — sparked after Homelander assaulted his wife, Becca, and fathered a natural-born Supe named Ryan.

Eric Kripke.

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

By the series’ end, the writers wanted to take away all of Homelander’s superhuman abilities. “We wanted everyone to see what a complete and utter coward he is once you remove his powers, pretty much like every autocrat and strongman,” Kripke says. Naturally, after Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) used her newly acquired radioactive blast ability to remove the tyrant’s powers, Butcher had to be the one to deliver the final blow: “It was really important to me and Karl that [Butcher’s] last line to Homelander is, ‘This is for Becca,’ which is the engine that drove everything that character has done since the beginning.”

To that end, Kripke set up Butcher’s central relationship with Hughie (Jack Quaid), the young electronics retail worker he recruited to act as his external conscience, from the pilot. “Butcher is aware on some level that he has this scorched-earth mentality and that he’s willing to do anything to get what he wants — and he needs someone to pull him back,” Quaid says. And after spending years appealing to Butcher’s better angels, Hughie ultimately serves as his mentor’s final restraint. Once the Boys take down Homelander, Hughie shoots Butcher to prevent the release of a catastrophic, Supe-killing virus.

Butcher also recruited Marvin Milk, a.k.a. Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), a hardened veteran with OCD whose deep-seated vendetta against Vought stems from a tragic family history. Alonso says he immediately recognized the character in his own life, having grown up in Washington, D.C., and attended Howard University, where he encountered “many people who are filled with the feeling that they can make a change.” As M.M. evolves from sidekick to central character, he also begins to behave more like Butcher, forcing him to wrestle with the erosion of his idealistic principles.

From the outset, Kripke also wanted “The Boys” to explore misogyny and sexism — primarily through Annie (Erin Moriarty), a Supe who falls for Hughie. Upon joining Vought, Annie was sexually assaulted by the Deep (Chace Crawford). Although the scene was added after her audition, in response to the #MeToo movement, Moriarty embraced the opportunity to play a “deeply flawed” young woman who makes an “objectively morally incorrect choice” in giving in to the Deep’s advances and must grapple with that trauma without losing her intrinsically hopeful nature.

Erin Moriarty, left, and Karen Fukuhara.

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

Moriarty has faced a torrent of online harassment herself about her physical appearance, which recently led her to reveal that she has been suffering from Graves’ disease. Like Annie, “I’ve learned to really allow that noise to exist externally and not let it in, because at the end of the day, it’s not the kind of feedback that’s going to be good for my work, for my psyche, for my health,” she says of having “to develop a thick skin” by “necessity.”

Kripke — who is no stranger to dealing with online fandoms, as the creator of “Supernatural” — feels particularly protective of the people who work for him: “When you come at my actors, you’re coming at me a little bit, and I’m not going to just lay low and say, ‘Well, but it’s the audience, and I don’t want to lose numbers.’ No, [those trolls] can legitimately f— off to the sun if they’re going to talk s— about real people.”

Since the first season, Kripke has kept an open-door policy with his actors, giving them an opportunity to voice concerns about their characters. “Eric knows that he understands the show on a macro level. All of us actors have to understand it on a micro level; we have to be the experts in our characters,” Quaid says.

That close collaboration has allowed Kripke to play to his actors’ strengths. With the Deep’s deadpan delivery, for instance, Crawford felt free to lean into his natural comedic timing. As a result, he injected levity into a role that could have come across as purely unsympathetic. In examining the corruptibility of fame, the hilariously inept aquatic Supe became “a nice vessel to project and show all the things that are wrong with toxic masculinity or what’s going on in the current culture,” Crawford explains.

Similarly, Alonso helped design his Black freedom fighter’s Harlem apartment and worked with Kripke to rewrite M.M.’s monologues each season; Fukuhara recalls Kripke altering a scene without hesitation after she expressed discomfort about a script that called for Kimiko to fight naked.

Trust in the showrunner was paramount on a job that required actors to play out some of the most shockingly grisly depictions of superhuman nature. After setting the tone with A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) running through and killing Hughie’s then-girlfriend Robin in the pilot, “The Boys” has seen Hughie detonate a bomb in an invisible superhero’s rectum; M.M. get nearly strangled by an obscenely long prehensile penis called Love Sausage; the Boys drive headfirst into a whale; Kimiko kill an oligarch and his henchmen with dildos; and the Deep eat his octopus friend Timothy alive as a way to pledge his allegiance to Homelander. And, of course, who could forget the infamous “Herogasm” episode in Season 3?

Laz Alonso, Chace Crawford and Jack Quaid.

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

“One reason that [those scenes] stick in people’s minds isn’t because of the shock value. It’s because of all the different layers of emotion and meaning underneath it,” Kripke says. For instance, Quaid describes “Herogasm” as a Trojan horse: “You came — no pun intended! — for a superhero orgy, but you stayed for and you were really surprised by a lot of big, emotional scenes” between the Boys and the Seven.

Indeed, for all its theatrics, the surviving characters of “The Boys” get happy endings. Hughie and Annie are expecting a daughter named Robin, for example — a reveal that left Quaid in tears. “Erin made fun of me on the day because I kept staring at her fake pregnant belly, because it was so surreal for me,” Quaid recalls. “I’m not a father yet, but to me, the closest thing to being an expectant father was like, ‘Oh, my TV partner has a baby on the way!’”

Having survived human trafficking, brutal medical experimentation and years of bloody combat, Kimiko (Fukuhara) is finally able to enjoy a quiet life in France — even though she has just lost Frenchie (Tomer Capone), whom Fukuhara describes as her character’s “twin flame” and “soulmate.” “She really comes into her own at the very end,” Fukuhara adds, “but the messaging of the final episode is that she is a strong person, and that [strength] has always lied within her.”

Kripke will continue to act as the steward of “The Boys” universe, allowing him to maintain the distinctive tone set by the original. His directives to writers pitching future “Boys” spinoffs are clear: The offshoot would have to be that scribe’s “passion project” and “totally distinct and unique from the others” in that franchise. (“Gen V,” the recently canceled first spinoff, was a classic coming-of-age story; “Vought Rising,” the 1950s-set prequel premiering next year, is “a noir, detective story”; a new “Mexico” spinoff would be a “straight-up horror story” incorporating the politics of Latin America.)

Beneath the universe’s unrelenting despair, Kripke has always seen “The Boys” as an inherently hopeful story.

“In my mind, it’s never been cynical about the human condition and about the importance of families, love and mercy and kindness,” he says. “Humankind’s ability to get up every time they’re knocked down and to keep trying and reaching out for each other is so beautiful. … It’s not even about winning; it’s about taking care of the people next to you, day in and day out. To me, it’s those hundred boring little gestures a day that save the world.”