Between the superhero orgies, anally inserted pipe bombs, and slo-mo body explosions (that last one courtesy of a runaway speedster), it’s hard to imagine the guy behind Supernatural and Timeless creating something so depraved as Amazon’s The Boys. But those are just the “pornographic ornaments” hanging from “a very wholesome Christmas tree” that is Eric Kripke’s new show. (His metaphor, not ours.)

Kripke, the showrunner adapting Garth Ennis’ highly graphic comics, was more interested in the metaphors at the heart of the live-action series. “[Superheroes] are this endless fountain of stuff that we can [use to] comment on what’s really happening in society,” he says on the show’s Toronto set last September. The supers can be “a metaphor for celebrity,” “sometimes they are a metaphor for politics, sometimes they are a metaphor for professional athletes.” In that way, Kripke believes The Boys is “the most current show on TV.”

The Anti Heroes

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Image via Amazon Studios

Ennis, the same writer who penned Preacher (now a series on AMC), began the 2006 comic run in part to explore comics culture, celebrity, and the military-industrial complex. This all holds new meaning in the modern context of 2019, when the live-action show will now premiere on Amazon (July 26).

In this world, The Seven are like the Avengers or Justice League, but their public-facing heroism is a cover for sociopathic tendencies — like Homelander (a Superman/Captain America hybrid) using his X-ray vision for his voyeurism and The Deep (Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford doing a play on Aquaman) #MeToo-ing the team’s new recruit. The only ones capable of keeping them in check are The Boys, the kind of blue-collar vigilantes, led by Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher, who tend to fight fire with disembowelment and eye-gouging.

"We have so many television shows and movies out there that are predominantly focused on the stereotypical perception we all have of superheroes,” Urban says. “What intrigued me was reading this material and that being completely flipped and seeing that these superheroes were tragically flawed and often anything but heroic.”

Kripke clarifies he’s “really not interested in shocking for shocking sake. That’s, to me, when it becomes exploitive… I always try to attack everything from a point of view of character and then let them be my guide.” And with material based the highly graphic Garth Ennis comic series, viewers are going to need a guide.

When Celebrity and Politics Collide

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Image via Amazon Studios

From his first dinner with Ennis to unpack the source material, Kripke will always remember what the comic creator revealed about his “core idea” for The Boys. “He said, ‘I was really interested in what would happen if you combined the worst of politics with the worst of celebrity.’ And, even then, it was before Trump got elected,” he recalls. “The world has come to reflect our show in a really unsettling way, to me, where the line between politics and celebrity are blurred to a really troubling degree.”

In our current reality, it’s now common for Kim Kardashian to sit down with the President of the United States, who is himself a former reality TV star wielding his newfound power with an apparent disregard for human life. (E.g. The immigration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border, attacks on LGBTQ peoples’ rights and women’s healthcare, demonizing “the other.”) In The Boys, The Seven are “the one percent of the one percent,” Kripke says. “Those people have all the power, literally.”

For Kripke, Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) is like Bette Davis: “She had a heart, but then she drank it away. Now she has to reawaken anything that is still human about her.” The Deep is “the pretty-boy actor who wants serious roles, but no one gives him serious roles.” A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is like Lance Armstrong: “It sucks to be a performance-based superhero. You are only as good as your last time.” As the next recruit, Starlight (Erin Moriarity), then, is like the Broadway newcomer: She “steps off the bus from Iowa and is immediately thrown into how horrific showbiz really is.”

“They are so used to being babied and catered to, and they have so much power and money,” Crawford says, noting how The Deep “doesn’t even really know how to go grocery shopping.” (Yes, there’s a scene for that.) “There’s a thousand, maybe 2,000 superheroes in the world, [and] there’s the top seven and these guys have too much power and they just take and take and take. So, it’s fun to see ‘Wow, they’re really bad’ and then have them be taken down is hopefully a good payoff.”

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Image via Amazon Studios

The ones taking them down under The Butcher’s watch are Hughie (“an ordinary dude in extraordinary circumstances,” says actor Jack Quaid), Frenchie (“deep inside, he’s an anarchist,” says Tomer Kapon), Mother’s Milk (“In many ways, I’m the mother of the group… the moral center,” says Laz Alonso), and The Female (Karen Fukuhara’s silent but extra deadly type).

On the lighter side of The Seven, Crawford gets to play on the movie franchise element of superheroes. His character has his own film called The Rising Tide with a tag line that reads, “Go Deep or go home.” (He shot a movie poster for it and everything.) “He loves the celebrity side of it, which is a a grimy thing to play,” the actor says. “There are scenes where I’m on the red carpet of The Rising Tide when he’s doing stupid interviews. He’s a contradiction guy: he’s talking about plastic straws and how we need to be better about saving the ocean and not over fishing, and then he’ll go and do a sushi commercial overseas and he’s drinking out of a plastic straw.”

On the darker side, Kripke uses The Seven to honor Ennis’ obsession with military and politics. “There’s a whole part of this show that, for lack of a better word, we’ve been calling the House of Cards,” he says. “Real politics. Real military involvement.”

“They get these contracts for these cities,” Crawford says, comparing it to “here’s A Rod going to [play for ] the Cleveland Indians.” He adds, “They are owned by this corporation [Vought] and they’re always looking out for the publicity side. How are they coming across, what’s the look. Similar to sports teams, but ours has more politics behind it because they’re so powerful and they’re up there with the government and clash with the CIA and FBI.”

“I think people have been leveraging celebrity and flash and glamor as a way to push through things that are not advantageous to the regular guy, but they buy it because it’s wrapped up in a lot of showmanship,” Kripke muses. “That, to me, is what The Seven do.”

MeToo Hits Superheroes

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Image via Amazon

On that same dark side, The Boys continued to shape as a series as certain events transpired in the real world. The allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein arose during the writing phase, and there were elements of the comics that spoke to the MeToo conversations happening in real time.

In the first few issues of Ennis’ comics, Starlight starts her first day as a member of The Seven with a tour of their Vought headquarters with Homelander. Not long after, she’s ganged up on by the team leader, A-Train, and Black Noir (the Batman equivalent), who sexually assault Starlight by pressuring her into performing oral sex against her will. Kripke agrees there are moments from the books that “were maybe done for shock value or humor” at the time and don’t hold up now. This introduction for Starlight was one of them.

When the MeToo moment emerged, the writers room reworked the material around Starlight and The Deep to tell a larger allegory for an actress’s dealings with a Hollywood network of toxic masculinity. “We thought it was really important to have a really strong female presence in the writers’ room,” Kripke says. “There is a total of four writers in the room, including me. It’s a small room and two of them are really strong, really smart women who have very strong opinions about how to make sure that a show that’s called The Boys appeals to women, too.”

Certain characters, too, have been gender-swapped from the comics into the show. Revealing some of them delves into spoiler territory, but there’s one we already know about: Stillwell. In the comics, James Stillwell is the high-ranking publicist of Vought and wrangler of The Seven. On the show, the character becomes Madelyn Stillwell by way of Elisabeth Shue, and her role is intertwined with Homelander (psychotically so).

“Eric is interested in utilizing this story as a vehicle to throw into light, if you will, modern themes in terms of less male chauvinistic attitudes, which were often predominant in the comics,” Urban believes. “There’s less graphic sexual content [in the show. The comics] were pretty full-on and often, at times, misogynistic.”

Crawford isn’t quite sure how viewers will respond to Starlight’s MeToo moment in the context of the show, but he feels confident in the writers’ approach. (Moriarty was busy filming at the time of the interviews.) “It was different in the [early script] version I read, but then they changed it,” he says. “They decided it would be better to deal with it head on and weave it in the story as a jumping off point for her character. That’s the type of show they want to make, they want it to be edgy and real and face things like that head on.”

Super Obsessed

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Image via Amazon Studios

Then there’s the whole superhero side of this superhero series, where comparisons to DC and Marvel are never far off. In fact, Kripke embraces them.

Hanging on the wall of Stillwell’s office is a portrait of Homelander making this Henry Cavill Superman pose. It’s also not a coincidence that The Seven’s lineup mirrors that of DC’s Justice League, but that comes directly from the comics, where Ennis had some fun with the idea of a group of heroes being treated like gods. While there’s no direct equivalent of, say, Black Widow on The Boys, in a larger sense, the show plays with the idea of Vought being like Disney’s Marvel: a massive company that dominates culture with a roster of superheroes.

“I don’t necessarily think it pokes fun,” Urban says of the Marvel/DC parallels. “Here’s the thing that I really responded to: it offers a different narrative.” That narrative, at times, plays out through Hughie, being on “the nerdier side,” as Quaid puts it. “He’s a huge fan of all these superheroes before he realizes the darker side to them.”

Ennis, Kripke says, “doesn’t like superheroes.” “I made him watch a superhero movie to try and make a reference of something we were talking about,” the showrunner recalls. “He responded with, ‘I made it through 20 minutes and then I can’t watch that shit anymore. That was the first superhero movie I watched since the first Iron Man and I turned that one off in the middle, too.’” (No, he did not name the other movie.)

Kripke, on the other hand, stans a good superhero movie. He wanted the show to have the same level of production value Marvel and DC fans are used to in the movies. Otherwise, “you are just dead,” he says.

That look comes courtesy of costume designer Lauren Jean Shannon, who worked on the first Iron Man. The Seven’s suits took four months to construct through body molding, which is why Kripke needed to cast quickly after receiving the green light before the 2017 Christmas break. The results are heroes who look like they could throw down with the big-screen titans we’re already familiar with. And Crawford, being The Deep, feels like a fun play on Jason Momoa’s sexy Aquaman.

“So much of [the show] trades on that people are fucking sick of superheroes, and the myths are so told and retold that they are becoming monotonous,” Kripke says. “That is the world and the attitude that The Boys, or the heroes of this story, take, which is, ‘Fuck superheroes. Fuck all their spandex and their rocket cars. I’m over it. And they are all assholes.’”

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