It's Payback time! Jensen Ackles on Soldier Boy's explosive mission on The Boys season 3
Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Boys season 3, episode 5.
Sayonara, Crimson Countess. It feels like we hardly knew yah. But if you come at the king, you best not miss.
Laurie Holden's chimp-loving supe met her end in the final moments of The Boys season 3, episode 5, "The Last Time to Look on This World of Lies." Free of his cryogenic chamber, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) made it his mission to track down the members of his old team of supes, Payback. He wants revenge on the people who handed him over to the Russians that performed traumatizing experiments on him for decades. He gets one-seventh satisfaction when he finds Countess tied up in her home (thanks to Butcher) and blows her to smithereens.
Now the Boys crew are split again. Hopped up on Temp V, Butcher (Karl Urban) and Hughie (Jack Quiad) leave Starlight (Erin Moriarty) and MM (Laz Alonso) in the dust as they go off with Soldier Boy. If they help him kill off the rest of Payback, they reason the World War II-era supe will do them a solid and kill Homelander (Antony Starr).
Amazon Prime Jensen Ackles' Soldier Boy is on a revenge mission in 'The Boys' season 3.
"Soldier Boy wants revenge on why he got taken out of the game, why he was left out to pasture," Ackles says in an interview for EW's On Set video series, which goes behind the scenes of The Boys season 3. "No one came and got him and brought him back." The actor adds, "He's a little pissed off that his team Payback, A, didn't come and get him but more importantly, B, gave him up in the first place."
Despite only making it to the fifth episode of the eight-episode season, Ackles says Holden was fantastic to work with, bringing "lots of ideas" to the set. Their explosive break-up was the first scene the two actually shot together for the show.
"It was a confrontation with an ex-lover," Ackles remarks. "And in the filming of it, Soldier Boy actually gets pretty upset. I understand some of that emotion was cut out [of the episode] because it didn't feel right. It didn't service the story, I think, as well as just being calm and cool and a stone-cold killer."
Showrunner Eric Kripke also talks about the brief celebrity cameo that arrives on the show just before the power couple imploded their relationship.
Seth Rogen, who executive produces The Boys with his longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg, pops in as one of Crimson Countess' clients from her private webcam on SupePorn.com (which is now a real thing, thanks to Amazon). Rogen's character goes by the handle @SIR-CUMS-A-LOT-779 and is ready to masturbate to the Countess inserting anal beads into herself — prior to their session getting interrupted by Butcher.
Amazon Prime Laurie Holden's Crimson Countess has seen better days in 'The Boys' season 3.
Apparently, Rogen didn't want to do it, but not because of the content of the scene. It was just that the show was coming out too close to the release of Hulu's Pam and Tommy series, in which he's also seen jerking off. But Kripke had exhausted all other options.
"We had a long list of name cameos that we wanted to go after to put in that scene, and for some reason they all passed," a cheeky Kripke explains. "I have no idea why they wouldn't want to jerk off to Crimson Countess aggressively on camera and then orgasm too early. I just can't imagine why an actor wouldn't want to do that dream role."
Kripke contacted everyone on their list, and every single person passed. So he had to return to Rogen. "It's so funny," Kripke says of that scene. "It's also really sex positive. He found a way to make it... It's not dirty and there's no shame. He's just like excited to be there and excited that he bought anal beads. He's ready with the lube, like, 'Here we go!'"
Learn more about the making of The Boys season 3, episode 5 in EW's installment of On Set in the video above, including pulling off the show's first musical. Watch all episodes of On Set via EW's YouTube channel.
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