SPOILER ALERT: This story incorporates spoilers for “The Boys” Season 4, Episode 6, currently available on Amazon Prime Video.
This week on “The Boys”: Homelander (Antony Starr), Sage (Susan Heyward) and Vice President-elect Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) round up some members of the Federalist Society to get consistent with their plan for complete supremacist domination and create internment camps for any naysayers — and somehow that wasn’t the craziest part of the episode.
First, there was the huge reveal that Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character, CIA agent Joe Kessler, has been a hallucination of Butcher (Karl City) this entire time. You can learn more about that here.
Second, Hughie (Jack Quaid) goes undercover as the super-web weaver at an elite alt-right party thrown by billionaire superhero Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) to debate Homelander’s plan — and ends up becoming Tek Knight and Ashley’s (Colby Minifie) plaything in Tek Knight’s sex dungeon, all the while pretending to be absolutely certain that he can handle all of this in the wake of the death of his father, Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg).
“It was one of the hardest and one of my favorite things I’ve gotten to do in this crazy world of a show,” Minifie said. Selection. “There was a lot of preparation for it. There were like four fittings for that costume balloon, which was designed by Michael Brown, and I loved being in that. However, I really loved how the writers and Kripke found this new door for Ashley to discover — how she released her stress, and how all the shit comes down. She gets all these items from Homelander, and then she just uses them in a new way and gets excited about it.”
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Third, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) proves her undying loyalty to Homelander by revealing that she is taking a prescription drug that makes her breastfeed (and enlarges her heart), giving Homelander the chance to truly breastfeed hers. Which makes Homelander, the head of the Seven, addicted to mommy issues, very happy.
“I really like how that scene came together, as a result of each of us coming at it with this total vulnerability and this honesty — which just makes it that much weirder,” Curry said. “But with Firecracker, despite her craziness and the things she spews, she has this uncanny way of knowing what people want, whether it’s in a crowd or one-on-one. And even Homelander, she can see the human inside that shell, and she can see what that human wants, even if it feels like a weird fetish on the skin. And she’s prepared to give that to him, too, because she’s not afraid of him — she has to be. But she really believes in her vision of who he is, so she doesn’t seem to have any reason to be afraid of him, and she becomes so susceptible to his vulnerability. It’s so intimate.”
Curry mentioned that a great deal of preparation went into that scene from “The Boys” costume department “simply to build the framework to make it possible” to depict Firecracker breastfeeding Homelander, adding, “The supersuit team should just patent the whole situation right there.”
See below for SelectionA Q&A with “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, delving into Firecracker’s breastfeeding scene, Tek Knight’s intercourse dungeon and Hughie’s torturous time pretending to be Webweaver.
Let’s start with the Tek Knight sex dungeon part. Where did the concept for this come from? And why bring Hughie into this now—kicking him when he’s down, having him get sexually assaulted by his childhood hero after his father just died?
Well, that’s a dark way of looking at it! We see it as hilarious. Clearly, Tek Knight is our model for Batman, and we really wanted to play with that trope: the fascist underpinnings of Batman as an extremely wealthy guy who preys on poor individuals, then the proceeds of prison. So that was one. Tek Knight was already set up to be a freak, so we were kind of halfway there. Then the notion came up that he should have a Batcave — but let’s be honest, the Batcave can be a sex dungeon. Like, even the real Batcave is just that aspect of being a sex dungeon. It’s really dark, and there’s rubber everywhere. It’s not too hard to add a couple of vibrators and then a weird urinal that turns into a face mask.
And within the comics, there’s an amazing storyline where Hughie goes undercover as a superhero. That was a storyline that Jack always asked us to do. So part of it is always being careful about what you ask the writers to do. So we finally have this Weaver character and the concept of Spider-Man being attracted to kink in the Batcave is just too good to pass up. Sorry, I just couldn’t let that go.
Was there any part of that scene, either in writing or when you filmed it, where Amazon said, “No, that’s too far away”?
No, that was pretty much the script. We had our poor assistant writer make a long list of real kinks, because we had looked for some. And I remember reading the list and I was like, “What is cake farting?” And then they explained it to me, and it’s a real thing — but don’t look it up. I just said, that’s unthinkable, we have to do it.
After that, it felt like it was a real neat tie-in to bring Ashley into this, as a result of she has dom/sub tendencies. I really like that it’s just such an ideal setup that he doesn’t know his own protected phrase. It’s like a phenomenal comedy setup that he’s been looking for it all along.
The protected phrase would always be “Zendaya” — with the trait that Tek Knight says is what Webweaver “probably loves the most” — as a nod to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man? Or have you been employed through other potential protected phrase concepts?
No, it was Anslem Richardson, who’s the good writer of the episode — he just put that in the first draft. I don’t think we ever mentioned it, and he just threw in that his protected phrase was “Zendaya,” and I just laughed so hard about that.
It’s the factor that Spider-Man loves the most!
Yes! It’s the factor that Spider-Man loves the most.
After going through all of this, Hughie finally breaks down in tears with Annie at the end of the episode, once they’re back at headquarters. Will we see more of this fallout in the final episodes? Because he’s been through a lot, including the death of his father, after that sex dungeon trauma happened..
His story in this explicit episode is the kind of denial and compartmentalization that a lot of us go through after dealing with the loss of a loved one. And if you look at the whole episode, he’s constantly saying, “I’m right, I’m right, I’m completely right. I’m right.” Which is what a lot of people do before they’re finally able to open the door to the pain that they’re feeling. And I think that’s part of the healing. So I think he’s going to continue and really try to take and learn what his father and mother taught him about forgiveness, and really try to carry that into the season. Because he really has the most mature and human arc of any of the characters this season.
Where did the concept for Firecracker Homelander’s breastfeeding come from? We all know his milk fetish, we all know his mommy fetish. However, the casting actually took it to that stage on screen and got Antony Starr and Valorie Curry comfortable with it…
No, actually, Ant and Val were like, “Let’s do this!” I believe I remember saying to Val the first day I saw her in Toronto, “Just to be clear, Firecracker is going to breastfeed him.” And I imagine her response was something like, “Well, of course she is.” If you take this character and how slavishly devoted she is to Homelander, and the way she would do anything for him — as she made abundantly clear by saying it to him about seven times in a row — giving him the thing he wants most in the world becomes logical, in a crazy way.
As we were saying in the room, as a result of her also vying to get to a higher place as a method of promoting Sage, they’re now competing for Homelander’s consideration. So the dialogue in the room came up that Sage is great at what people might want intellectually, but Firecracker is really wonderful at what people want emotionally. And we mentioned, “Well, what’s the one thing that Homelander wants most in the world that no one else can give him?” And it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to, “Well, he would want a girl who’s actually prepared to let him breastfeed.” And I remember distinctly, Ellie Monahan in the room said, “If we’re doing this, this is the craziest thing we’ve ever done.” And it’s close, man.
That scene, for starters, getting the milk squirted in his face, and Ant’s complete shock and joy is such a phenomenal second. Yet another sensible present would downplay that moment. And by the way, not so sensible — but that’s if you downplay it, you already know what’s going to happen.
The fact that we minimized it to the exact breastfeeding scene makes me cover my mouth every time. It’s just so beautiful, and wow. Just what it means to the characters — the actors’ balls to do that. I mean, it’s just my chef’s kiss to all of them.
And the medications that do this only make her heart a little bigger!
Just a little.
This interview has been edited and condensed.