Spoiler warning: Do not read on until you’ve watched the Season 3 conclusion of “The Boys.”
“The Boys” Season 3 finale ends not with a whimper, but a bang. After 40-plus minutes of chaos and treacherous team-ups, the light at the end of the dark tunnel that is militarized Vought supremacy is pushed further away, if not completely snuffed out.
In the climactic conclusion, viewers see the inevitable (if still shocking and brief) collaboration between Butcher (Karl Urban) and Homelander (Antony Starr), who eventually succeed in taking down an out-of-control, murderous Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles).
But the anti-superhero show’s explosive and game-altering sequences don’t take place until the show’s final moments: In the aftermath of the Deep’s (Chace Crawford) treason, congresswoman and secret head-exploding Supe Victoria Neumann (Claudia Doumit) is installed as the prime vice presidential candidate. What’s more, the now-feral Homelander — in a scene so bone-chilling there’s nary a word to describe it — murders a protester who calls him a fascist in broad daylight. Instead of eliciting horror, legions of his rancorous extremists (one of whom is stepfather to M.M.’s daughter) cheer wildly as his child Ryan adopts a vacant half-smile.
In a conversation with TheWrap, cast members Crawford, Ackles and Doumit expressed the joy and “fun” of working on the outlandish show, which is unlike any other, showering praise on creator Eric Kripke and the writer’s room for the storylines they get to perform.
“When we’re shooting it, we’re all kind of like, ‘Is this gonna work, like are these tonal shifts going to work?’ And they totally do,” Crawford, whose Aquaman spoof often serves as a darkly comic relief character, told TheWrap. “And it’s like we talk about, you know, if Marvel characters were real and human, nature isn’t so black and white and formulaic like it is in the saturated superhero storylines we’re used to seeing, sort of play the gray area and play the human insecurities has been a lot of fun.”
Doumit, whose character will have a greater arc next season, said she’s “always excited” to explore Neumann’s duplicitous persona, whose approach to people changes “character to character.”
“I think that her daughter is very important to her — more important than any other person or any other thing — so it was endlessly fascinating to dive into her this season because you get to see glimpses of her personal life and how that operates and functions — or dysfunctions because it’s dysfunctional, for sure,” she said.
And while that ending doesn’t end on the best terms for Soldier Boy, Ackles said the experience allowed him to trust his gut feelings on who his complex, deranged character is, upon Kripke’s encouragement.
“Honestly, Kripke and his crew, they write such colorful dialogue and descriptors that, you know, I even asked him, I said, ‘Do you want me to read the comics and brush up on who this guy is?’ And he steered me away from that and said, ‘No, don’t do that. I don’t want that to affect any choices you might make.’ So he encouraged me just to kind of trust my instincts, but largely it comes off the page in such a beautiful way and we’re, as actors, very fortunate to have such amazing writing and we trust it and then they trust us to perform it,” he said.
Watch a portion of the interview above.
