Claudia Doumit is on fire as Victoria Neuman in Season 3 of The Boys. She did make a big impression when she was first introduced in Season 2 of the Prime Video series, but we had to wait nearly the entire season to see what Neuman was really capable of. Now, in Season 3, not only is Neuman less secretive about her head-popping ability, but she’s also proving to be one of the most complex characters to track.

Neuman may convey a certain set of goals and values to the public, but deep down, she’s got a top-secret agenda that she’s determined to see through to protect her daughter, Zoe (Olivia Morandin).

Claudia Doumit in The Boys
Image via Amazon

You don’t become this skilled at conveying multiple emotions and intentions in a single moment without some serious training and experience, and Doumit has certainly put in the work in that respect. With Season 3 of The Boys now available to stream in its entirety, Doumit joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party to recap how she went from getting rejected from acting schools in Australia to starring in one of the hottest shows on Prime Video.

How exactly did Doumit power through all of that rejection at such a young age? Turns out, her mother was instrumental in making that happen. Here’s how Doumit put it:

“When I was 17 I graduated high school and I auditioned for all the big acting schools in Australia and I got rejected from every single one of them. And 17-year-old me was absolutely devastated at the time. And I remember my parents saying, you know the old thing, they’re like, ‘Well, you’ve gotta get an education of some kind. You have to get some education.' So I went to one of the universities and I dicked around in an arts degree for a semester and a half, and then I dropped out, didn’t tell my parents, and started taking acting classes on the side. And then I remember my mom said to me one day, ‘Your schedule’s a bit off.’ And that’s when I told her! I was like, ‘I’m acting. I’ve dropped out of university. I wanna be an actor.’ And she did the best thing a parent could do in that situation. She had a moment of a breakdown, and then she was really supportive and she said to me, ‘Okay, if you want to be serious about acting, let’s be serious about acting. Talk to every person you know, every person you respect in the industry like teachers, mentors, everything and ask their advice,’ and I did. I knew like five or six people that I really looked up to at the time and I had calls with all of them and I asked them, what should I do? And every single one of them told me to leave Australia. They said, ‘You’re not gonna work here. You’re never gonna work here. Your face, your look doesn’t sell.’ They said, ‘Go somewhere where there’s more opportunity. Go to London, go to Los Angeles, go to New York, anywhere you can get your foot in the door.’”

Claudia Doumit in The Boys
Image via Amazon

Doumit’s mother’s support didn’t stop there. She’s actually also the person who connected the dots between Doumit and her very first manager. She explained:

“My mom had met a woman who was a manager in Los Angeles. She actually met her a few years prior at a function or something and I didn’t know this, but she’d been sending her what I’d been doing over the years, so if I did a production of Julius Caesar, she’d email her and she’d say, ‘My daughter’s Brutus in Julius Caesar in this local production!’ Which is mortifying. Thank god I didn’t know any of that. But she was very much letting this woman know my journey with acting over the years, and so I set up an appointment with her. We came to LA and we set up a meeting, and it went really well! And she said, ‘I love your energy. Come back with a visa and an accent and I’d love to represent you!’ And I was like, ‘Great! I’ll be back in a month!’ A year later I came back with a half-baked accent and a student visa because I got into this acting school, this acting conservatory right on the intersection of Hollywood and Highland … And that’s how I started here, and that manager kind of cultivated my career and she was like, ‘I’m gonna send you out on a few things,’ so it was really just opportunity. I was told to leave my country if I wanted to get the opportunity that I wanted and this is just how it worked out. LA was the place.”

Claudia Doumit at The Boys Screening
Image via Amazon

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That it was! After moving to Los Angeles, Doumit made guest appearances on shows like New Girl and Mike & Molly, but it was Scandal starring Kerry Washington that gave her her first full dose of what really goes into making a long-running series:

“It was such a beast of a show and it was just such a moving machine. I mean, I was like Bambi in the woods. I was so very lost. But you really got an insight into how the machine works and how much stuff they get in a day and how many people are used on a project. It was insane to be in that environment because the only thing I’d been exposed to before that really is like a small student film or you’re in a theater production at school. It’s a whole nother world and you have to kind of adjust your lens to that world, and that was my first big dose of that was being on Scandal.”

No doubt Doumit was ready for The Boys when the opportunity came around, but when she first booked the role of Victoria Neuman, she didn’t know much at all about who the character would become. In fact, she didn’t even know Neuman was supe with head-popping powers until well into the filming of Season 2:

“I booked the job and I thought she was this progressive democrat, I thought she was this politician coming in hellbent on taking down this evil corporation, so driven and so pure. And then I got the script for Episode 7 of Season 2, and that’s when we’re in the hearing and she starts popping everyone’s heads.”

Claudia Doumit in The Boys
Image via Amazon

[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for The Boys, Season 3, Episode 4, "Glorious Five-Year Plan."]Ultimately, not only do we come to learn that Neuman is The Head Popper, but Season 3 of the show also reveals that she’s actually Stan Edgar’s (Giancarlo Esposito) adopted daughter. Through much of her run on the show thus far, Neuman’s been loyal to Edgar, pulling the strings behind the scenes to further his agenda. However, in Season 3, when she starts to feel Homelander’s (Antony Starr) threat, Neuman makes a game-changing decision. In Episode 4, “Glorious Five-Year Plan,” Neuman betrays Edgar by accusing him of corruption during a press conference.

While there is some authority in how Neuman approach’s that particular moment, she’s still clearly caught in a tornado of confusion while dealing with the sky-high stakes of making her next move. Here’s how Doumit put it:

“She’s going through an incredible internal conflict this entire season. And every decision that she makes, she makes two pretty big ones that are ultimate betrayals of those closest to her, and she’s fully aware of that. And to go against someone like Stan Edgar for any person would be a terrifying moment, and for Neuman you have the added aspect of him being a father figure to her and the person who’s been there for her her entire life. So she’s definitely on edge. I played it, I don’t know if it came through, but she’s hesitating with what she’s about to say. Does she say it? Does she not? So there’s definitely a moment of, ‘This is my decision.’ There’s definitely a moment of decision there on that stage.”

Claudia Doumit in The Boys
Image via Amazon

Doumit continued by emphasizing how Neuman’s current headspace proved to be an especially exciting performance challenge:

“It was actually amazing this season because I got to really dive into the nuance of her vulnerability, or who she is behind the masks that she wears in the public eye on a daily basis with every interaction she has. So it was actually so much fun to find out, how does she actually act? How does she actually react to a situation? Because she has so many interactions where she’s kind of feigning a reaction to something or she’s just acting. She’s an actor! But you get a few really raw moments with Neuman where you get to see what woman she is.”

Looking for more from Doumit on playing Victoria Neuman in The Boys? We have that and more for you in her full Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party interview in video form at the top of this article or in podcast form below: