How ‘The Boys’ Shaped the Emotional Journey of Season 4
“Deep Dive” is an in-depth podcast and video essay series featuring interviews with the stars and creative team behind an exceptional piece of filmmaking. For this edition, the IndieWire Crafts and Special Projects team partnered with Prime Video to take a closer look at “The Boys” with creator Eric Kripke, actor Antony Starr, production designer Mark Steel, costume designer Laura Jean Shannon, visual effects supervisor Stephan Szpak-Fleet, supervising stunt coordinator John Koyama, composers Christopher Lennertz and Matt Bowen, as well as editors David Kaldor and Scott Stolzar to examine the emotionally charged and shocking fourth season of the hit series.
When it comes to “The Boys,” you can expect the unexpected. Since its inception, creator Eric Kripke has adapted Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic book series into a standout among superhero offerings. The Prime Video series is beloved for its dark humor and imaginative violence, but it keeps audiences watching because of its intelligent writing, unforgettable characters, superb acting, and engaging storylines that are rife with conflict and emotional resonance. In Season 4, the complexity of the characters is pushed even further as they’re forced to question wounds from their past.
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Kripke, actor Antony Starr, and eight members of the creative team spoke to IndieWire about how they were able to weave emotionally charged themes to deepen our understanding of the characters without losing sight of what makes “The Boys” an entertaining satire. In the videos below, watch how those involved in the series developed the engrossing backstories through production design, costumes, score, editing, and visual effects.
Only Superhuman
One might not think death-defying superheroes spend much time considering their own mortality, but such was the case in the fourth season of “The Boys.” Creator Eric Kripke told IndieWire that Season 4 was meant to be “the low point for the characters” where each one confronts “the trauma that really defines them.”
For Homelander, played by Antony Starr, the dream of a brighter future prompts a return to a traumatic past. “His humanity has always been his kryptonite. As much as he wants to be a god, he’s always been aware that he’s human,” Starr told IndieWire. “That mortality being on display and the sense of legacy really drives all of what he does through the whole season. He’s really concerned about what’s gonna happen when he dies.” Starr brilliantly captures the weight of the character’s internal conflict, culminating in a terrifying sequence during which Homelander seeks revenge on a group of Vought researchers who conducted experiments on him as a child.
In creating the ominous moment, production designer Mark Steel found inspiration from the “Cold War era” to give shape to the laboratory sets, adding nuanced details to heighten the realism. “We put all the dents at kid height and made it sort of feel like this was a familiar place he’d been in before,” Steel told IndieWire. And the composers enhanced the tension twofold. “The tension is so crazy, to think that everyone knows: just the slightest flinch and you’re dead,” said Christopher Lennertz, who worked alongside fellow composer Matt Bowen. “Musically, there’s a lot of things that we took a pause for and it was to have it be this breathing of like, oh my god, tension, tension, tension. Oh, maybe he’s not gonna kill him. And it’s this back and forth.”
There are plenty of gruesome deaths in the sequence, including a memorable cremation with a live scientist. “When you’re meeting people, I always ask for as much practical fire as possible. So the very last shot of that sequence was the dummy on the ground,” VFX supervisor Stephan Szpak-Fleet said. “It was a mixture of Indiana Jones and OG face melts and having done so many burning bodies and melty, gross shit for this show by now.”
“The way he comes in and the way he goes out are the key moments,” Starr noted of the sequence. “Because he goes in really not knowing what’s gonna come out of it. And then in the elevator on the way out, that smile was everything. That’s like therapy.”
In the video above, watch the team break down Homelander’s complicated relationship to his own humanity — and how he handles it. As costume designer Laura Jean Shannon pointed out, “In this season, we built new suits — we took away the flap that he’s had since Season 1, that was his ability to loosen up.”
Alter Ego
Akin to Homelander, Billy Butcher, stoically portrayed by Karl Urban, faces his own moral dilemma. Does he walk the path of righteousness or release his inner demon? In shaping the character’s arc, Kripke separated Butcher from his group of ragtag partners, leaving him to think about how to make things right with his adoptive son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti). “We knew that Butcher was going to spend so much time alone and he has a literal angel and devil on his shoulder. One character who’s telling him, ‘Show love, show mercy,’ and then he has another who’s like, just become a monster,” Kripke told IndieWire.
Crafting the juxtaposition was a key development early on. “He’s really down in the dumps at the beginning of Season 4, and we’ve got hints that he’s losing his mind but maybe hasn’t completely gotten there yet,” noted editor David Kaldor. The angel on his shoulder is his deceased wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten), while a new character, Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), plays his devil, who, in a late reveal, turns out to be a figment of Butcher’s imagination. The haunting revelation plays out through a montage of moments where Butcher believes he’s talking to Kessler, but in fact, no one is there. “When he starts to go through the flashbacks, we have this, like, rhythmic piece of distortion that just starts to loop on itself and starts to feedback on itself,” said composer Matt Bowen.
“Kessler represents all the bad stuff in Butcher,” editor Scott Stolzar said. “He tried, and he failed, and he immediately reverts back to the absolute worst version of himself.”
The event that firmly turns Butcher to the dark side is seeing Ryan send CIA officer Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) through a brick wall. “It’s such an emotional moment. Kripke and I talk about it all the time, some things, kept simple and just fast and violent, hit harder than all kinds of fancy moves and fancy wire work,” said supervising stunt coordinator John Koyama about creating the tragic death of the character.
“For Butcher, it feels like a line that Ryan has crossed that he won’t come back from. And if he doesn’t have Ryan, then what the hell is he holding onto his humanity for? That’s when Butcher accepts that fate,” revealed Kripke.
Crafting a Super-Rivalry
Part of what “They Boys” does so well is seamlessly introducing new characters, whether it’s a minor one like Will Ferrell making a cameo as a coach in a Vought-produced film or a major one, like Sister Sage (Susan Howard), the mastermind behind Homelander’s political rise. But no one made a bigger impact this season than Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a right-wing “truth bomber” who cozies up to Homelander as part of the Seven. The political mouthpiece becomes a sore spot for Annie (Erin Moriarty), revealing some of her darkest secrets.
“There’s a lot of political figures that are folded into Firecracker,” said Kripke. “A big one, though, is the QAnon movement and just this overall notion of these unfounded conspiracy theories based on misinformation and social media and how they metastasize into this very frightening worldview.”
In designing her super suit, costume designer Laura Jean Shannon infused a red, white, and blue color scheme with a customized camo jumpsuit as the base. Leather was infused into the creation along with metal accents and an ammo belt across her chest. “When Vought gets their hands on Firecracker, they take aspects of her costume that she wore, and they bake the DNA of that into their bells and whistles version of the Seven branded super suit,” explained Shannon. Similar thought went into designing her televised special “Truth Bomb.” “The whole idea of that stage set up was this guerrilla event happening across the street,” noted production designer Mark Steel. “Putting her brand in full relief behind, putting it on the floor, so that in every shot, you’re just entirely immersed in her brand. It was a graphic design approach that we took and it was for television.”
Before Firecracker and Annie go toe-to-toe, supervising stunt coordinator John Koyama spoke with the actors to find the emotional undertones of the scene to “drive the action.” “It was just so great seeing Annie be a badass in her little quasi-preppy sports coat,” said Shannon. “And there was something really amazing about this sort of clashing of good and evil, but the one that deserved the beating was in her patriotic red, white, and blue.”
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