The Boys isn’t new to aligning with and even predicting certain headlines in the news, as creator and showrunner Eric Kripke shared a specific example of Homelander (Anthony Starr) aligning with and preceding Donald Trump’s famous AI Jesus photo.
Kripke, supervising stunt coordinator and director John Koyama and actors Jessie T. Usher and Karen Fukuhara were at Deadline’s Contenders TV event to speak about the fifth and final season of the comics-based Prime Video show.
“The five seasons has been the slow descent into madness for Homelander, and this season we thought, ‘Well, let’s take him the craziest he could possibly get,’ which is he decided that he wants to be a god,” Kripke said. “I thought that was the craziest thing that could ever potentially happen, until Trump released an image of himself as God 48 hours before we aired. Can I just say, they’re making it really hard to do satire. Slow down for one f*cking minute and let us be more absurd than the world? That would be great.”
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There still are positive themes Kripke wants to tackle as well.
“On the hero side, people say the show is so dark, but the theme we were most interested in was hope,” he said. “How do you hold on to hope in the darkest possible times, which I think is quite relatable, and how do you keep getting up every time you’re knocked down? And some big hero isn’t swooping out of the sky to save you, so we all have to get busy saving ourselves. What does that look like?”
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To close the panel, Kripke shared that he will miss being able to process crazy happenings in the real world through making the show.
“We didn’t necessarily plan on it, but for [the show] to reflect the world in the period that we’re living in so specifically — this intersection of authoritarianism and celebrity and social media and fascism and just this swirl that we were able to hit at just the right time — you spend your whole career trying to chase, trying to hit the zeitgeist, and it’s going to be really hard to do it again,” he said. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I am grateful and appreciate it. As a matter of fact, now I have this experience where I’ll read whatever is the latest horrific headline in the news every morning, but now I don’t have a place to put it.
“I can’t take it to the writers room and write it into the show, and I feel incredible amounts of sympathy for everyone because now I have to swallow it and internalize it like everybody else,” Kripke continued. “And that sucks! Oh my god. That sucks. You guys, you should all just write about it. It’s so much healthier.”
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