‘The Boys’ Showrunner and Stars Spill ‘Herogasm’ Secrets, Including the One Note Amazon Gave on Superhero Orgy
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Herogasm,” the June 24 episode of “The Boys.”
“The Boys” finally blew its biggest load of wild content this Friday with the release of the Amazon Prime Video superhero series’ long-awaited “Herogasm” installment. In just an hour, showrunner Eric Kripke, episode writer Jessica Chou and director Nelson Cragg went balls to the wall by throwing The Boys and The Supes into the sticky situation of the 70th annual superhero orgy event Herogasm.
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It’s an episode of “The Boys” pulled directly out of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic book series that the show is based on, and was adapted in as much X-rated glory as Kripke and the team felt they could conceivably put Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie (Jack Quaid), MM (Laz Alonso), Annie/Starlight (Erin Moriarty), The Deep (Chace Crawford), Homelander (Antony Starr), Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and many a background character through. Special credit goes to MM, who suffered an unexpected explosion of semen all over his body courtesy of Love Sausage, the superhero with an extra elongated and fully controllable penis, who previously strangled MM with his genitalia in “The Boys” Season 2.
Variety spoke with Kripke and “The Boys” stars about the many explicit scenes that made up “Herogasm” — and the surprisingly emotional moments that will have repercussions in the back half of Season 3.
Imagining the “Imagine” Spoof
Let’s start at the beginning, as “Herogasm” warms up its audience by opening the episode with a spoof of “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video, which was released at the start of the pandemic and featured celebrities like Natalie Portman, Cara Delevingne, Kaia Gerber, Kristen Wiig, Zoë Kravitz, Will Ferrell, Pedro Pascal, Mark Ruffalo, James Marsden, Jamie Dornan, Sia, Jimmy Fallon, Sarah Silverman, Amy Adams, Maya Rudolph and Leslie Odom. Jr., among others, all singing lines from the John Lennon classic. The Gadot-coordinated clip was deemed a tone deaf response to those suffering amid the lockdowns and spread of COVID-19.
So, naturally, “The Boys” had to spoof it by giving the idea to The Deep and having him enlist Patton Oswalt, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Josh Gad, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, Elizabeth Banks, Kumail Nanjiani, Aisha Tyler, Rose Byrne and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) to perform the “Imagine” montage.
“The Gal Gadot ‘Imagine’ video came out while the writers were writing,” Kripke told Variety. “And when it came out, we all kind of came in and everyone was sort of buzzing about it… The target was too big and juicy to not go for, because she’s a superhero putting out something to the public that is a little tone deaf to the struggles that people were really going through. Just that notion of, ‘I’m going to help people through just my sheer star power.’ It’s not a well-performed song just, ‘My sheer power as a celebrity will help heal you a little bit.’ I mean, she did it with good intentions, I don’t want to shit on it. But it was funny. And so we were like, ‘That’s something The Deep would do. The Deep would do that.’ So we got the rights to the song and started calling all of our friends. And really just any of them who were like, ‘Yeah, I’ll film myself seeing a couple of lines from “Imagine,”‘ we said ‘Great! Do it. Send it to us.’ We ended up with a really awesome roster of people.”
Crawford loved doing the bit, and heard “there was talk” of getting “The Boys” superfan President Barack Obama as one of the celebs featured in the parody. But Kripke clarified that was purely a gag.
“No, no, no. Jessica Chou, who wrote the script, in a cheeky way, wrote, ‘Here’s all the people that we want to sing a verse’ and wrote her wish list, ‘culminating in President Obama!'” Kripke said. “But at no point were we going to call Obama. I think we would definitely call Obama and get him in the show, but that would not be the favor I would call in, if I had a line to President Obama.”
The calls that Kripke and executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg made to get stars to participate in the parody did have to be handled delicately though, seeing as they couldn’t hit up the many people who were in the original “Imagine” video. “Nor could you, for example, go to people who were tangentially connected to people who were part of that video,” Kripke said. “We ran into a couple people were we asked who were like, ‘Look, like, I would but I’m going to be in a movie with blah, so…'”
Inside the Orgy
Once the episode gets to the actual Herogasm part, the wild nature of the hedonistic scenes that “The Boys” team has been teasing for months were finally revealed. And the level of wild reached on screen showed they were not at all underselling the making of this episode.
“I remember reading the ‘Herogasm’ issue and just being really blown away by how absolutely depraved and insane it was and how hilarious it was at the same time,” said Quaid, who was among the actors who were nude for large portions of the episode, due to Hughie’s temporary super power that causes him to lose his clothes each time he teleports. “So I was really looking forward to getting to dive into that storyline for the show. But shooting it was something else. Like, you think you’re very comfortable with certain things. Then you get there and you kind of realize what you’re not so comfortable with (laughs). But everyone was so lovely, and special credit goes to all of the background actors in that scene because they were there longer than any of us doing things that would make most people squirm and be very, very uncomfortable with. And they just committed 1,000%. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much confidence on display. Just, ‘Here I am,’ you know? And it kind of encourages you a little bit and makes you have a little bit more bravery in situations like that. It doesn’t feel as weird if everyone around you is also naked.”
Quaid said that during shooting, he heard his “favorite quote” from his time on set, courtesy of a crew member who made an unfortunate mixup. “It was the COVID season, so we had a lot of places where you have hand sanitizer, and I overheard a crew member say, ‘Oh man, I got the lube bottle confused with the hand sanitizer bottle.’ And he had just lube all over his hands. You are never going to get that on any other show. It made me laugh so hard and made me feel really bad for that person. But that whole episode — I’m never going to shoot anything like that again. And the fact that all the storylines wrapped up around that event are so interesting and cool, I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever done and I’m really proud of it.”
Those storylines includes MM and Annie showing up at the supe-owned house where the Herogasm event is taking place and not participating, but trying to protect people from Homelander and Soldier Boy’s inevitable showdown at the superhero orgy, as Homelander is looking for Soldier Boy and Soldier Boy is looking to kill members of his old supe crew that betrayed him. Annie and MM end up being the ones to help those hurt in the carnage, and Annie goes live on social media to out Homelander and Vought for what they truly are, and report the reemergence of hero-turned-villain Soldier Boy.
“The ‘Herogasm’ episode is wild and hilarious and disturbing and working on that episode was one of the craziest things I’ve ever done and I can’t anticipate anything overtaking it,” Moriarty said. “But I think the thing to keep in mind is that, usually, Annie comes out as one of the strong ones. We are quick to assume that, here she is, this ingenue that literally wears white and gold and so, therefore, she’s malleable. The thing to keep in mind is she exemplifies the fact that appearances can be deceptive and that she encompasses vulnerability and strength at the same time. But, when put in a situation like ‘Herogasm,’ which involves a lot of exploitation of female bodies — and this has been kind of a core movement for her, in terms of what she stood up against — I think everyone is going to be really happy about her ability to stay strong and stay on a mission and not do anything she doesn’t want to do or anything where she is manipulated into a situation where she has to do any sexual act. She’s done with that, she learned it the hard way, she flipped it in a really positive, feminist way and we see in this episode that she is implementing the lessons she learned when she was first inducted into Vought.”
The One Note Amazon Had
Amazon has embraced the gory and naughty nature of the Emmy-nominated “The Boys,” giving fewer notes to the writers on what is truly going “too far” as its popularity and critical acclaim have continued to increase since its first season. But there was just one note that Kripke says Amazon gave on “Herogasm” that he accepted as more than fair.
“The one note we got from Amazon, which was a good note, was, ‘In every moment, we have to understand that this is a superhero orgy, and not just an orgy,'” Kripke said. “We actually added afterwards, a lot of new gags and visual effects. Like, I love that there’s that floating Starlight vibrator that’s just cruising around the party. That was not originally scripted or in there. We added that in VFX later. There’s a lot of moments like that that are just kind of happening in the background.”
Kripke adds that there were “definitely things in the comics version of ‘Herogasm’ that I was not interested in touching.” “For as crazy as the show is, the comic is exponentially crazier,” he said. “And there were some things in there that I just would not want to touch — literally or figuratively. So it was more about us trying to decide what feels right for the tone and that usual battle for us — what’s outrageous but never gratuitous?”
That “My Octopus Teacher”-Inspired Moment
In towing that outrageous-but-not-gratuitous line, Kripke came up with the idea for one of the craziest moments in all of “Herogasm”: When Annie walks in on The Deep having sex with an octopus.
“There is a little inter-human-cephalopod romance that may or may not be inspired by ‘My Octopus Teacher,'” Moriarty said, noting that the this act witnessed by Annie “can never be unseen” — and she herself requested not to see it before the scene was shot in order to get the best reaction on screen.
Crawford confirmed the “My Octopus Teacher”-inspiration part, saying that Kripke told him he got the idea while watching the Netflix documentary.
“He was watching that documentary, which is a very touching documentary, and he was like, ‘Is the guy, like, sexual with it? Is he going to, like, fuck this octopus?’ That was going through Kripke’s mind and he was like ‘Ohhh, this is going to go in the writers’ room.'”
Once outside of the writers’ room, it was up to the production team to actually create the fake octopus that Crawford would be simulating sex with during “Herogasm.”
“I would preface it with this: Kripke has said, it’s so absurd the science of it. Scientifically it can’t actually happen,” Crawford said. “There’s not an orifice. So it’s so out there, but that rig was the most cumbersome and annoying. I didn’t realize how heavy it was going to be. It was like a necklace. It was hanging around and they wrapped it, but it was so heavy they kept having to detach legs because I couldn’t last all day doing it with this 40-pound thing.”
Annie and Hughie Bare It All
Annie and Hughie have a very raw, honest fight about their relationship during ‘Herogasm’ about an issue that has been bubbling under the surface since Season 1: He actually is uncomfortable with the fact she has super powers and is stronger than him, and she has realized that these are his true feelings, not a thought-altering side effect of him using the Temp V to gain his own powers.
“We all have a dark side to us and it’s not about trying to pretend the dark side isn’t in there, it’s dealing with that and grappling with that and trying to manage that as best you can,” Quaid said. “I think that’s the true measure of whether or not you’re a good person, because we all get cranky, we all fly off the handle, we all have emotions that we don’t like having. But it’s all about managing that and making sure that doesn’t hurt the people around you. I completely agree with Annie and side with her 1,000% when she says that it’s him. I think the V brought it out in a more pronounced way, but I do think that that is who he is. And this season really forces him to look at that side of himself and come to terms with it and then try to fix it, which I believe he does by the end of the season.”
Moriarty says Hughie and Annie were bound to reach this point eventually because they are, at their core, an average couple with average problems.
“In addition to all of these extreme things going around them, they’re not immune to the everyday issues that couples go through that are also triggered by being in a romantic relationship,” Moriarty said. “And I think that they exemplify that being in a romantic relationship is hard no matter what. It’s especially hard in this world, but they experience issues on the level of ‘The Boys’ world, on that extreme level, and on the level of the very real world that people will probably be able to relate to a lot.”
Because this is the “Herogasm” episode, Annie and Hughie, of course, ended up having most of this very serious fight in the nude, as Hughie’s teleportation powers stripped them both down when they exited the party in a flash.
“It just added this other layer to it,” Quaid said. “Thankfully, Erin is such a great scene partner and I feel like that’s such a pivotal scene in our arcs in the season. It was good to get lost in the emotion of it, because… that ultimately ended up winning out over how many clothes we had on. And by that point, we’d already shot the bulk of ‘Herogasm,’ so we were kind of used to seeing naked bodies as soon as they said action at this point. You get a little bit used to it because, yeah, in the wide shot you see all of us, but when we got into coverage, the camera cuts off and you’re able to be in whatever you want below frame. But it shows how much trust Erin and I have built over the seasons. As awkward as that scene might have been to shoot with someone else, with Erin, it was a breeze.”
Soldier Boy and Homelander’s Highly Anticipated Showdown
While Soldier Boy and Homelander did not participate in any of the crazy sex acts going on at Herogasm — unlike their characters in the comics — they did have pivotal roles of party-crashers who blow the house up with their first face-to-face meeting of “The Boys” Season 3. Butcher and Hughie had brought Soldier Boy to Herogasm to help him kill his old teammates, but had the good fortune of finding Butcher’s No. 1 enemy Homelander show up there, too. It looked like Soldier Boy was going to take out Homelander, or at least rid him of all of his powers, but the “upgrade,” as Homelander calls himself, was able to escape the OG supe at the last second.
“There’s certainly a similarity, because they were and are the the leaders of their particular superhero gang,” Ackles said. “And they were the ones that Vought hinged their whole game plan upon. They were the quarterbacks of the team. There’s a lot of the old bull coming back into the ring and and how he looks and how he relates and how he sizes up the young bull. And that’s kind of what we get to see. It was interesting coming in, being the new guy, but playing the one who’s been there the longest and it really led to an interesting dynamic, especially with Homelander.”
Ackles went on to tease that “there’s some heavy, heavy secrets that I can’t talk about” coming up for Soldier Boy in the final two episodes of “The Boys” Season 3. “But just know that Kripke has always got stuff up his sleeve and I was, hopefully, just as shocked as you and everyone else will be when I read that particular script and was just like, ‘Whoa, wait, what?’ I had to sit down.”
We Can’t Believe Frenchie Missed It
A running gag throughout the “Herogasm” episode was The Boys commenting on how upset Frenchie (Tomer Capone) will be to have missed Herogasm. Of course, he’s a little busy right now with him and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) being captured by and escaping Little Nina. But still, how will he feel about it when he does find out?
“I mean, ‘Herogasm’ happens once a year, no? I think they might cancel it now, yup, yup,” Capone joked. “You know what, the only thing I really — as myself — was bummed that I missed was MM’s part in ‘Herogasm,’ because Frenchie was there for the big penis on Season 2 and I saw it and I enjoyed it as a friend, as a cast member, as a partner, just to watch my friend struggle with that thing. I was texting Karl to send me pictures. I was texting Jack to send me pictures. I think they were too fucking grossed out by it, they didn’t pick up the phone. But I got one picture that I won’t share that made me feel a bit more OK with it. I’ll say no more. But Herogasm will come back, and it’s going to be bigger than ever, because Frenchie is going to be there. What is Frenchie going to bring to a Herogasm party, an ass bomb?”
Jordan Moreau contributed to this story.
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