When actor and rapper Daveed Diggs was cast as superhero preacher Oh Father for the fifth and final season of Prime Video series “The Boys,” he didn’t think his musical skills would be called on for the gig. But the show’s composer, Christopher Lennertz, had other ideas.
“When they announced that he was going to be in the show, I immediately texted our showrunner, Eric (Kripke), and said, ‘We need to have him do a musical number.’” Lennertz said. “And he was like, ‘I don’t know. That wasn’t part of the plan. Let me think about it.’”
Kripke thought about it for a few months before bringing it up to Diggs. “He very apologetically approached me and was like, ‘You can say no, but we do these musical numbers sometimes. Would you be interested in doing one?’” said Diggs, who won a Tony and a Grammy for his performance in “Hamilton.” “I really don’t do stuff like that post-‘Hamilton,’ but I just loved the way it fit into the show, so I said, ‘OK, but I have to be involved in the writing.’”
After a false start on a contemporary hip-hop song, Diggs and Lennertz collaborated on what turned into the Emmy-nominated “Raise Him Up,” a roaring funk-gospel number sung by Oh Father as he struts across a glitzy altar surrounded by scantily clad dancers dressed as angels. The style is pure church but the message is not, with Oh Father proclaiming that the psychopathic superhero leader Homelander (Antony Starr) is, in fact, God: “Now the world’s too dark for a Jew in robes and sandals/I’ll take a god who lasers vandals,” run the opening lines.
“Once we got going, it just got down to the business of ‘How far can we take it?’” Lennertz said. “And Eric’s notes are usually of the variety that’s like, ‘Great, can you make it even crazier?’”
It wasn’t hard for the songwriters to find inspiration. “Eric told me about stuff they were reading in the writers’ room about the trajectory of the religious right,” Diggs added, “about the very intentional co-opting of religion in the United States, and places of worship being turned into places of politics. It’s gotten so ubiquitous at this point that we don’t even notice it most of the time. It just feels normal.”
“What I like about the song is that you really have to think about it to realize that ‘We’ve got a God who’s strong and just an American like us’ is an insane thing to say.”
He laughed. “If it weren’t so specifically about American politics, it would’ve felt like a shark jump. But it never does, because the more they push it over time, the closer our political system has come to what they’re talking about. It’s not really a funhouse mirror. It’s just a mirror.”
Lennertz agreed. “It was probably written a full year before the (2024) election and filmed half a year before the election,” he said. “So we didn’t know that there was going to be a meme with a politician pretending to heal a sick person with glowing lights. We certainly didn’t know that there was going to be a giant life-sized golden statue on the lawn of a resort when we made a giant golden Homelander statue that looks just like it.”
“You’re like, ‘Wait, how did you know?’ But we didn’t know. We just were guessing, partly because that’s the way it always works with people who are corrupt and trying to pull a fast one.”
“That’s the point of the song, but it’s also the point of the series. The whole concept of ‘The Boys’ from Episode 1 was, you think you’re seeing what you know and love about superheroes, and then slowly you’re going to realize that this is not Captain America or Wonder Woman. This has all been corrupted by power and greed and money and corporations, just the way everything else gets corrupted like that.”
“So this song is absolutely not making fun of a religion or a deity or a belief system. This song is making fun of corruption and greed and power-hungry people who don’t have anything good or holy or noble in mind.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
