[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Boys Season 3.]From show creator Eric Kripke and based on the best-selling comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the Amazon Studios original series The Boys never fails to shock and awe in its irreverent take on superheroes corrupted by celebrity. With very little to stand in his way and no regard for the powerless, an increasingly unhinged Homelander (Antony Starr) is pushing Butcher (Karl Urban) and Hughie (Jack Quaid) to go further than ever before in their attempts to stop him.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Chace Crawford (who plays The Deep, a superhero desperate to get back into The Seven and Homelander’s good graces) talked about how much he knew about Season 3 going into shooting it and the hint that Kripke had given him, always pushing boundaries in such wild ways, which co-star he likes to try to make laugh, shooting the show within the show alongside Billy Zane, how they did the octopus scenes, and the wild experience of Herogasm.
Collider: So many things have happened on this show, since we spoke for Season 1.
CHACE CRAWFORD: It’s just a normal story arc on a normal, little, subtle show.
In keeping with the first two seasons, there are a lot of crazy things that happen in Season 3, and it feels like there is a lot to unpack with this show. How much did you actually know about this season going in? Did you know the full arc of the crazy journey that your character would be taking, or did you just have pieces of what his journey would be?
CRAWFORD: Before Season 3 started and before I got any scripts, (showrunner) Eric Kripke was like, “Did you ever see My Octopus Teacher on Netflix in 2020?” And I was like, “I did. It was touching and it was moving, but now I’m scared. I feel like that’s not the direction you’re gonna go in, Eric.” No, I didn’t really know the full extent of it. Every time we pick up a script or open a script, I’m always pretty floored with what’s happening, but this was definitely a very big shock.
Did you have a moment where you realized how insane it all was? When did the reality of the season set in?
CRAWFORD: It still hasn’t. I’m still going through the seven stages of grief. I’m in the denial stage still. I haven’t fully accepted it. No. I guess it really only gets real when it comes out, and it starts airing, and you start seeing people’s reactions to it. I’ve been a little nervous. I had no idea what their twisted brains were gonna come up with.
Just when I think the show can’t push boundaries any further, it still seems to somehow push those boundaries so far into the rearview mirror that you just can’t even see them anymore. Are you always surprised when you read these scripts? Do you have moments of, “They want me to do what?,”, or have you just gotten used to that, for this show?
CRAWFORD: I’ve gotten used to it, to some extent. In Season 2, I thought with the whale stuff, they might have been overreaching a little bit. I was like, “Okay, that’s trying a little bit too hard,” but it turned out so well and so funny, and it really worked for the characters. Eric always says, “The crazy stuff is the cover of the cereal box.” The characters really do have some great storylines, and they operate in the gray area. It’s not so black and white, with all the characters. The whale thing turned out so well that we all just go with the flow and take the curveballs where they’re sent. Even the mushroom trip scene where I’m singing and talking, I thought was phenomenal. I read that and was a little nervous. I was like, “I don’t know how I’m gonna do that on the day,” so I had to figure that one out. You just roll with the punches. Kripke’s door is always open. I think I only had one panic attack call with him, this past season, so that was good.
The brilliance of this show is the fact that I don’t know how it works, every time, and yet somehow, it works, every time.
CRAWFORD: You and me both. I have no idea. But it does. They really do pull it off, every time.
As far as just your own personal taste level, what do you consider the most outrageous thing the show has done, whether this season or just any season?
CRAWFORD: It’s gotta be this season. It’s gotta be the opening 20 minutes at that party. I read that, and I was like, “How are they gonna do this?” But of course, they did it. It’s hilarious. It’s outrageous. There’s nothing like it, ever on TV. I read it, and I was like, “Oh, my God. Wow.” We went through a crazy 2020. The pandemic was awful. I was like, “Finally, we’re getting some scripts!” I had forgotten. I had the popcorn ready, and then I was like, “Oh, my God. Okay. That makes sense. I should have known.” But we’re always surprised. There’s always something worse. Mother’s Milk has it pretty bad. But they did put The Deep through the ringer this year.
I thought the craziest was gonna be the dolphin scene. That was the first really insane thing. I was like, “How is this even gonna work?” It had these weird tonal shifts, and it set the tone for some of the comedic stuff. The second season was the gill stuff and the singing. Even when The Deep a has comeuppance in Season 1, when he took the girl home in Ohio, and he got semi-assaulted himself, which he absolutely deserved, that was pretty wild to shoot too. But this year definitely raised the bar a little bit.
What has been the hardest thing to shoot without laughing?
CRAWFORD: That’s a good question. My goal is to always try to make Antony Starr crack because he’s tough. He takes it very seriously. This past season, one of the opening scenes, when I run into him at the news studio and he realizes that I was before him in the news segment, he gets upset about it. I improved something like, “Shia LaBeouf’s ghost writer wrote it for me. I don’t even know how to read.” And I saw him trying not to laugh. After that, it was a little bit tough to get through that day.
Do you think that The Deep’s need for forgiveness, especially from Starlight, is genuine? Does he want fame and fortune, or does he really want a more purposeful life?
CRAWFORD: I think he is starting to realize that he does. He’s just so un-self-aware that he doesn’t quite know how to get there. I think he would need some more therapy. I think he would have to untangle some of that stuff. It’s so easy for him to flip back into being narcissistic and thinking he’s the one who has gotten himself back into The Seven, when it’s really Cassandra. It’s that thing where you say, “I’m sorry,” on camera. He’s like, “I said the written statement. I said I’m sorry. Was that not enough?” It’s hard for him to be genuinely remorseful and take responsibility. It brings up that question of, can you forgive the unforgivable? Is he redeemable? I don’t know. I don’t think he is.
These characters are all so awful that they’re almost on an even playing field.
CRAWFORD: They’re all shitheads, yeah. There’s no one that’s really morally on the straight and narrow, that’s for sure. It’s all bad.
What was it like to get to do the whole Not Without My Dolphin show within the show, and to work with Billy Zane?
CRAWFORD: That was amazing. That was actually the first thing we shot, back in 20 21, when I got back to the show. It was just really bizarre. After 2020 was so weird, to be on set, doing this really meta, funny, B-movie trailer for the show, we had so much fun. They let us run with it. Obviously, the whole thing couldn’t make it into the show. I think there’s a drop-down x-ray button, where you can watch the full thing. We shot a bunch of it, and it was so much fun. After we shot it, and they edited it together, our resident producer, Phil Sgriccia, was like, “I think we should shoot the fucking movie! I think we should just shoot this whole movie.”
What was it like to do the scenes with an octopus? You’re doing intimate scenes with an octopus, but is there anything actually there? Is there a tennis ball? Is there a stuffed octopus? What are you actually working with?
CRAWFORD: It depends. The special effects guys are incredible. For the eating Timothy scene, it was very simple. It was a few setups. The scene took longer to shoot than just my coverage on that. There were chopsticks and there was a mochi ball, or something like that, with some syrup mixed with chocolate, and that was it. And then, they did another gag, where there were two people kneeling next to me, and there were strings on my face with tape, and they were pulling the tape. That was it. And then, I saw it and was like, “Oh, my God. Wow!” It was so much harder to watch when. When they put the effects in, it’s crazy what they can do. The other gag was a 40-pound mechanical octopus around my neck. They had to keep cutting off legs because it was just so heavy, but it looks amazing. One of them, where I’m looking in the water tank, was just a green X. It was just a mark on the tank. It wasn’t a lot to work with.
Homelander sends The Deep to Herorgasm. What was that like to read, on the page? How was that to shoot? Did you feel like you escaped easily, compared to what some people were doing?
CRAWFORD: I did, actually. It’s funny to say that I escaped easy with the scene that I had to do, and I still haven’t even seen the episode. I like to wait and watch, as they come out. I’m scared. But those days on set were like war stories on set. I’d see the crew outside, smoking a cigarette when they don’t even smoke. They’d be like, “Oh, my God, have you guys been to set yet?” And I was like, “No, what happened? Is it a war zone in there?” It kind of was a war zone. Jack [Quaid] and Jensen [Ackles] had some interesting stories. I’m interested to see it. Jack had to be in his birthday suit quite a bit this season, which I think is very funny. It’s been funny to see. There’s a lot of shit that happened in Herogasm, so I’m excited to see it. Mine was lost in the totem pole of craziness.
The Boys is available to stream at Prime Video.