The Boys cast members Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Laz Alonso and Jensen Ackles recently gave fans new insight into the violent and visceral visual effects featured in the Prime Video superhero satire's third season.
Urban, Quaid, Alonso and Ackles appeared alongside visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet in a VFX breakdown video shared by The Boys' official Twitter account. Among the notable behind-the-scenes secrets shared in the video is the process of bringing Billy Butcher's laser vision to life, with Urban recalling how he would "strike a pose" on set that Fleet and his team would then augment with CGI. Fleet also devotes a considerable amount of his screentime to detailing how The Boys Season 3's pixel-powered gore was achieved, describing the scene in which The Deep (Chase Crawford) eats a live octopus as "probably singlehandedly the hardest thing" the show's visual effects artists had to work on.
A recurring theme throughout the visual effects breakdown is just how over-the-top The Boys Season 3 is, with Quaid singling out the orgy sequence in Episode 6, "Herogasm" as "the craziest thing [he's] ever shot." Showrunner Eric Kripke touched on the episode's notoriety in a recent interview, insisting the orgy scenes were designed to do more than just gross-out audiences. "[Herogasm] felt like it needed to be an event, but it couldn't just be an event by people boning," Kripke said. "It had to be an event by [making] huge changes to the story. It's every bit as shocking as [fans] are expecting it to be, but not at all in the way they think it's going to be."
Homelander Actor Talks Up The Boys Season 4
Kripke and The Boys' writers' room apparently have no intention of toning things down in Season 4, either. On the contrary, according to Homelander actor Antony Starr, the show's fourth season will top its predecessor in the graphic content department. Starr teased that The Boys Season 4 "gets weirder and weirder and weirder" with each successive episode and includes "the most bizarre thing" he's done in his career. He added that the scene in question was so outrageous it left him questioning his life choices. "I said, 'What are we doing? I can't believe this! I could have done anything else with my life, but here I am doing this?'" Starr recalled.
Starr nevertheless made it through The Boys Season 4's shoot, marking the end of principal photography on Twitter. This was later followed by an official wrap video tweeted by The Boys' official account that featured Kripke delivering a heartfelt message to the cast and crew at odds with the show's edgy image.
The Boys Seasons 1-3 are currently streaming on Prime Video. Season 4 does not yet have a release date.
Source: Twitter