‘The Boys’ Stars Reveal What to Expect From Their Characters in the Final Season (VIDEO)
On the surface, The Boys may be about extremely un-P.C. superheroes, exploding body parts, and language that would make meth-mouthed pirates blush, but beneath all of the TV-MA action, there has always been a deeply psychological slant to the story. How grief, trauma, and abuse have shaped the behaviors of the good and bad guys. How one man’s idea of justice can be another’s fascism. How a woman literally silenced by the men who made her life hell can find her voice again.
At the beginning of the series, Erin Moriaty‘s Starlight was a reluctant supe being groomed for greatness by the evil Vought corporation and now, she is risking it all for the love of her beau Hughie (Jack Quaid) and the future of mankind. And yet she’s still unsure of her own heroism.
“The world is so dark and so complicated around her,” she told us in the video above with the cast. “She’s been forced to kind of be put in this position of isolation and also constantly wondering whether or not she’s doing things the right way.” For Quaid, the road to Season 5 has been filled with growth, including a period of toxic masculinity that has thankfully been replaced with an understanding that now all heroes wear capes.
“The beauty of playing a character for five seasons is that I got to see him change from a boy to a man,” Quaid shares. “I think a big thing that I wanted to get across this season was that he was ‘Huey without fear.’ All of the bad things in the world that could happen to a person happened to him and he’s still here.”
Prime Video
Equally unflappable, but way less altruistic is Susan Heyward‘s Sister Sage. Enhanced with the sharpest mind in the world, Sage has been a bit of an enigma since joining Vought’s stable of villainous supes: She is definitely up to something, whether it’s sinister or just self-serving is the question. One, Heyward hints will be answered soon. “We were developing her as a sphinx,” she says, adding that Sage has a reason for not always sharing all of the knowledge she has access to. “That we will get into in Season 5.”
Sage’s fellow Vought addition, Firecracker, is the exact opposite, according to Valorie Curry. And even though she’s loud and not exactly blessed with brilliance, the actress sees her conservative podcasting pot-stirrer as a tenacious, if reckless, asset to Homelander’s endgame. “She’s keeping her head above water, you know what I mean? She will do what she has to do to survive, like the cockroach that she is. But there has never been a goal and a plan executed.”
Speaking of Homelander, does Antony Starr think there’s any good left in his supremely corrupt anti-Captain America? “I would say yes, but in the same way that there probably would’ve been a good in Jeffrey Dahmer,” he offers. “It’s just covered and it’s so deep. So buried. It’s so deeply buried in wreckage.”
So much wreckage, in fact, that Starr can’t see how Homelander could ever be anything but a lost cause. “I don’t think there’s any way back,” he notes. “I think you cross the line, the point of no return has been crossed, and now there’s only explanation. There’s no redeeming.”
The Boys, Season 5 Premiere, Wednesday, April 8, Prime Video
Sometimes Going Rogue Pays Off
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