Note: this article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1, of “Gen V.”
The “Gen V” cast opened up about their late co-star Chance Perdomo, who starred as magnetism-manipulating supe Andre Anderson, saying the actor’s death has removed a piece of their hearts.
“There’s a big hole in our hearts, in our cast and the ‘Gen V’/’The Boys’ universe,” Jaz Sinclair, who stars as Marie Moreau in the series, told TheWrap. “Having to move forward without Chance was really heavy for everybody and really difficult emotionally. My personal experience with it was just trying to get through it and do him as much justice as we can.”
After a brief recap of the first season, Season 2 of “Gen V” starts with a dedication to Perdomo: “For Chance.” While the first episode throws it back to 1967 to tell Dr. Godolkin’s backstory, the show carries Perdomo’s legacy as Andre forward by bringing the cast’s real-life emotions into the series throughout the overarching plot.
As we saw last season, after Homelander attacked Marie during the bloody massacre on campus, she and the group wake up to find themselves in a doorless, hospital-like facility with no idea how they got there, which we now know to be Elmira. In the first episode of Season 2, Jordan Li (London Thor/Derek Luh) and Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway) are still being kept detained before someone suddenly hauls them off in a truck and transports them to a new location.
When they open the doors, they arrive back at Godolkin University where they are greeted by good-turned-bad supe Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips). When she inquires about Andre’s whereabouts, an angry Jordan tells her to read their minds, though they never say aloud exactly what happened to Andre until the end of the episode when the group confronts on-the-run Marie. After finding Marie through a social media video, viewers learn that Marie left the group behind in Elmira after she found an opening in the captivity. Jordan then explains that Andre died during an attempt to break the group free.
“After you escaped, he said you were proof that there was a way out, and he found some metal maintenance pipe,” Jordan explains. “But he wouldn’t just go by himself, he waited for when we all had a chance. But when he took us, somebody had walled the pipe off with brick and he couldn’t pull it open … So he tried to rip open a huge steel door instead and it wouldn’t move. His powers weren’t strong enough, and I begged him to stop … And he kept trying and he stroked the f–k out and he dropped and he died.”
Phillips shared that the entire experience has been “surreal” and that she tried her best to keep her spirits high during filming.
“If you’re working that many hours and you’re also grieving, it’s just so hard,” she shared. “So in the ways that I could, I really tried to just be there for everybody. And thankfully, I’ve got my own really great personal support system as well.”
The actress also praised showrunner Michele Fazekas and executive producer Eric Kripke for giving the cast and crew space to mourn the loss.
“I just feel very, very grateful that we have Eric Kripke and Michele and all of the people who are responsible for creating the show,” Phillips added. “They all are really good people with really good hearts, and they, I think, made the right and only decision, which is to completely honor him in this season … It’s just a nightmare, but I’m just really grateful that it was handled with such care, and we were all really given space to be humans. It really reminds you what’s most important.”
On March 28, 2024, Perdomo died in a motorcycle accident. “Gen V” production subsequently announced it would be pushed back to May of the same year, further noting they would not be recasting the role.
For Sean Patrick Thomas, who stars as Andre’s supe father Polarity, returning to set without his on-screen son felt unnatural.
“Coming back for Season 2, it was a very eerie feeling. Everything that I’ve done up until the beginning of Season 2 was with Chance, all of my scenes,” he said. “So to come to set for Season 2, and to have him not be there, [was] very, very disorienting and hard to wrap your brain around, and it’s still just so senseless that he’s not here.”
Thomas added: “The writers really gave us a great opportunity to work through all of those things by keeping him alive in our minds, by keeping him alive in the storyline of the show, by lifting up who he was and the type of person that he was on and off camera. So I’m reluctant to talk about the whole thing with Chance. It’s a hardship to me because the tragedy happened to him and to his family.”
Andre’s name isn’t just called out in the first episode; the beloved character is mentioned over the course of the next two episodes, which is a sure sign that Perdomo will be memorialized throughout the entire season.
“Chance was such a big, bright, expressive, beautiful soul, and I know his legacy living on would mean a lot to him, and hopefully to his mom,” Sinclair said. “So us dedicating the season to him and having Andre be such a prominent part of the story was very important.”
The first three episodes of “Gen V” Season 2 are now available on Prime Video.
