Courtesy of Prime
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 4, Episode 6 of “The Boys,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
This week on “The Boys”: Homelander (Antony Starr), Sage (Susan Heyward) and Vice President-elect Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) rally some members of the 1% Federalist Society to fall in line with their plan for total white supremacist domination and internment camps for all detractors — and somehow, that wasn’t the craziest part of the episode.
First, there was the giant reveal that Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character, CIA agent Joe Kessler, was just a hallucination of Butcher (Karl Urban) all along. You can read more about that here.
Second, Hughie (Jack Quaid) poses as the super web-slinger at the right-wing party thrown by super billionaire Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) to discuss Homelander’s plan – and ends up being Tek Knight and Ashley’s (Colby Minifie) plaything in Tek Knight’s sex dungeon, all the while pretending he’s perfectly fine and can handle it all right after the death of his father Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg).
“It was one of the hardest and one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in this crazy world of a show,” Minifie said. Variety“There was a lot of planning for this. There were about four fittings for this balloon outfit, which was designed by Michael Brown, and I loved being in that costume. But I really loved how the writers and Kripke found this new outlet for Ashley — how she’s released her stress and how it all flows. She’s taking everything she’s getting from Homelander and then using it in a new way and having a blast.”
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Third, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) proves her undying loyalty to Homelander by revealing that she takes prescription medication that makes her lactate (and enlarges her heart), giving Homelander the chance actually for breastfeeding of her. Which makes Homelander, the mommy-issues-obsessed leader of the Seven, very happy.
“I love the way that scene plays out, because we both came into it with this total vulnerability and sincerity — which makes it even weirder,” Curry said. “But with Firecracker, despite her craziness and the things she spews, she has this uncanny ability to know what people need, whether it’s in a crowd or one-on-one. And even with Homelander, she can see the human inside that shell, and she can see what that human needs, even if it looks like some weird fetish from the outside. And she’s willing to give him that, too, because she’s not afraid of him — she should be. But she really believes in his vision of who he is, so she feels like she has no reason to be afraid of him, and she makes herself so vulnerable to his vulnerability. It’s so intimate.”
Curry said a significant amount of preparation went into that scene by “The Boys” costume department “just to build the architecture that would allow” to depict Firecracker breastfeeding Homelander, adding, “The super-suit team would just have to patent the whole situation there.”
See below for VarietyQ&A with ‘The Boys’ showrunner Eric Kripke, who delves deeper into Firecracker’s breastfeeding scene, Tek Knight’s sex dungeon and Hughie’s tortuous time pretending to be Webweaver.
Let’s start with the sex dungeon part of Tek Knight. Where did the idea come from? And why put Hughie in this situation now, by beating him up while he’s down and having him sexually assaulted by his childhood hero after his father’s death?
Well, that’s a dark way of looking at it! We think it’s hilarious. Obviously, Tek Knight is our version of Batman, and we really wanted to play with that trope: the fascist underpinnings of Batman as this very rich guy who preys on the poor and then profits from incarceration. So that was an example. Tek Knight was already designed to be a monster, so we were already halfway there. Then the idea came up that he should have a Batcave—but let’s be honest, the Batcave would be a sex dungeon. Even the real Batcave is just that side of the sex dungeon. It’s really dark, and there are rubber suits everywhere. It’s not that hard to add a few dildos and then a weird urinal that turns into a face mask.
And in the comics, there’s a great storyline where Hughie pretends to be a superhero. That’s a story that Jack had always asked us to do. So part of it is you always have to be careful what you ask of the writers. Then we finally got this Webweaver character and the idea of Spider-Man going down to get tickled in the Batcave was just too good to pass up. I’m sorry, I couldn’t pass that up.
Were there any moments in that scene, either in writing or while filming, where Amazon said, “No, that’s too far”?
No, that was pretty much all that was planned. We had our poor assistant writer come up with a big list of real flaws, because we were looking for them. And I remember reading the list and thinking, “What’s the cake fart?” And then they explained to me that it was a real problem, but don’t bother looking. I just said that was incredible, that we had to do that.
And then it seemed like a natural fit to bring Ashley into it, because she has dom/sub tendencies. I like that it’s a perfect situation, that he doesn’t know his own safe word. It’s like a nice comedic situation that he’s trying to find all the time.
Was the safe word always going to be “Zendaya”? with the hint that Tek Knight says this is what Webweaver “likes most”” — as a nod to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man? Or have you thought about other potential safeword ideas??
No, it was Anslem Richardson, who is the brilliant writer of the episode, he just put that in the first draft. I don’t think we ever discussed it, and he just said his password was “Zendaya,” and I just laughed out loud at that.
This is the thing Spider-Man loves most!
Yeah! That’s what Spider-Man likes best.
After going through all of this, Hughie ends up breaking down in tears with Annie at the end of the episode once they’re back at headquarters. Will we see more fallout from this in the final episodes? Because he’s already been through a lot with his father dying and then this trauma of the sex dungeon happened..
His story in this episode in particular is the kind of denial and compartmentalization that a lot of us have when we’re dealing with the death of a loved one. And if you watch throughout the episode, he’s always saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m perfectly fine. I’m fine.” That’s what a lot of people do before they can finally open the door to the pain that you’re feeling. And I think that’s part of healing. So I think he’s going to go on and really try to absorb and learn what his father and mother taught him about forgiveness, and really try to integrate that into the season. Because he really has the most mature and human arc of any character this season.
Where did Homelander get the idea for Firecracker to breastfeed? We know his obsession with milk, we know his obsession with moms. But the choice to take it to that level on screen and make Antony Starr and Valorie Curry comfortable with it…
No, of course, Ant and Val were like, “Let’s do it!” I think I remember saying to Val the first day we saw her in Toronto, “Just so we’re clear, Firecracker is going to breastfeed him.” And I think her response was something like, “Of course she’s going to breastfeed him.” When you take this character and how slavishly devoted she is to Homelander, and how much she’ll do anything for him – as she’s made clear to him by telling him seven times in a row – giving him the thing he wants most in the world makes sense, in a way.
As we were talking about in the room, because she’s also competing for a better position to sell Sage, they’re now competing for Homelander’s attention. So the conversation in the room was that Sage is great for what people might need intellectually, but Firecracker is really amazing for what people need emotionally. And we said, “Well, what’s the one thing that Homelander needs most in the world that no one else could give him?” And it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to, “Well, he needs a woman who’s actually willing to let him breastfeed.” And I distinctly remember Ellie Monahan in the room saying, “If we do this, it’s the craziest thing we’ve ever done.” And it almost is, man.
That scene, first of all, where the milk is squirted on his face, and Ant is shocked and delighted, is a beautiful moment. But any other sane show would cut at that point. And it’s not that sane, but that’s when you cut, you know what’s going to happen.
The fact that we cut to the breastfeeding scene makes me want to cover my mouth every time. It’s just mind-blowing, and wow. That’s exactly what it means to the characters – the courage of the actors to pull that off. I mean, that’s just my boss kiss to all of them.
And the drug that does that only makes his heart a little bigger!
Just a little bit.
This interview has been edited and condensed.