“We genuinely don’t have conversations about trying to top ourselves,” Kripke tells Den of Geek during the show’s appearance at SXSW 2022. “I think it’s dangerous because if you’re working to go bigger and bigger it’s an unsustainable pattern. Eighty percent of the conversation in the room is ‘how do we go deeper with the characters and how do we put them through existential crises?.’” There’s no reason to doubt Kripke and the writers’ room sincerity. Commitment to character development plays a role in any show’s appeal, but particularly The Boys. Adapted from an equally violent comic of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, The Boys is one of Prime Video’s biggest success stories. Through two seasons the stories of the Vought Corporation’s “supes” and the underground faction known as “The Boys” who keeps them in check has been a major cultural and critical hit. Still…even though Kripke is adamant that character comes first, he can’t help but reveal that for the show’s upcoming third season, set to premiere on June 3, there is plenty of madness to be had as well. Simply put: viewers crave exploding bodies and blood. And The Boys season 3 is going to be more than happy to provide all that gore…if it can keep up with the demand. An anecdote from Mother’s Milk actor Laz Alonso illustrates a peculiar supply chain problem. “I do remember during episode 3 hearing the head of the makeup department talking to one of her girlfriends about ordering more blood. (She said) that they had already gone through more blood by episode 3 than they had through the entire season 2.” Just as our superhero landscape must constantly grow bigger with new team-up movies, ponderous TV side projects, and all manner of merchandising, so too must The Boys’ world. The Boys season 2 delved into the past of superhero history with the introduction of Stormfront (Aya Cash). Now season 3 is set to dig even further back by presenting the show’s very first supe: Soldier Boy. As played by Jensen Ackles (who previously collaborated with Kripke on Supernatural), Soldier Boy is sort of The Boys’ answer to Captain America – an image of an archaic patriot suddenly brought back to an unfamiliar modern world. Ackles will be joined in the cast by Soldier Boy’s fellow 1940s “Payback” team members Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden) and Gunpowder (Sean Patrick Flanery). Before the show can further delve into the story of Payback, however, there are some lingering issues from its core cast to address early on. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is now working with Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), who unbeknownst to Hughie is a secret brain-splattering supe. Fellow Boys teammates Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) and Frenchie (Tomer Capon) are still working through their sweet courtship, with Frenchie finally getting a full handle on American Sign Language to better communicate with his silent superpowered friend. There will also be some dancing much to Fukuhara’s surprise. “I’m most excited for everyone to see Kimiko’s dance sequence with Frenchie,” she says. “There was a tiny bit of it in the trailer. You know I never expected to be able to do something like that ever in life. And I got to do it in a show playing a character that doesn’t speak.” On The Seven side of things, Starlight (Erin Moriarty) and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) will have to recover from their titanic battle against Homelander and Stormfront. The Deep (Chace Crawford) is still stuck in his Church of the Collective purgatory, while A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is on his way back into the Seven good graces. Homelander (Antony Starr), for his part, will likely be more adrift than ever, having lost what he seemed to perversely see as his family, with his “wife” Becca dead and their son Ryan set to call Billy Butcher papa. As for how that might go, Butcher actor Karl Urban is cautiously optimistic about Butcher’s parenting chops. “At the end of the season he made a promise to Becca that he would look out for Ryan. He finds himself torn between two worlds. One to fulfill that promise. The other, trying to get justice/revenge for her death and what happened to her. It’s that moral, inner turmoil battle that he struggles with. It’s a lot of fun.” “We decided to go full Bill Bixby. Great Incredible Hulk moment,” Urban says of a powered-up Butcher. “To me the interesting character element about that is ‘how far are you willing to go to achieve your goal?’ To destroy the thing you hate the most are you willing to become that thing? To me that’s a very interesting existential question. All of the characters in the Boys have choices to make.” Not only does every character on The Boys have a choice to make but so do the folks behind the scenes as well. For, while honoring the characters is the first priority for Kripke and company, they also did inherit some truly wild moments from their source material. One of which, the iconic and disgusting “Herogasm” arc, has been confirmed to take place in the back half of season 3. But don’t think for a moment that even a superhero orgy is an indulgence. “It all comes from this very logical place of ‘if there really was a superhero orgy what would it look like?’ How would you depict it in the most honest way possible,” Kripke says. “Because we’re all about integrity here. We’re just telling the truth, man.”
