The Cast of ‘The Boys’ Sounds off on the Show’s Most Gruesome Moments

You ain’t ready for The Boys. It doesn’t matter if your superhero movie go-tos are Deadpool and Kick-Ass. You haven’t seen anything like the comic book carnage that’s just been unleashed on Prime Video.  The series, based on a cult favorite series published by Dynamite Entertainment, is set in a world of superheroes that has a lot of surface similarities to the one seen in classic DC Comics TV shows and Superman films. Beloved heroes wear bright, shiny costumes and fight to uphold shimmering American values–but all that altruism is a show.

The Boys asks the question, “Wouldn’t people with that much power and that much fame be raging jerks?” The Boys also responds with a resounding “yes, and they’d be ultra-violent bastards, too.” The violence on the show is relentless, showing the real world ramifications of superpowers in grisly detail. Seriously, if a guy as strong as Superman punched you in the face, your head would leave Earth’s atmosphere. That’s The Boys‘ reality, and the show executed it using a sickening amount of prosthetics, props, and fake blood and brains.

“A lot of it was real,” Karen Fukuhara told Decider during the Boys press junket. Fukuhara got to see lots of mayhem up close while playing the feral, one-woman wrecking crew that is The Female. “I think the crazy [scenes] that I’ve seen are all of The Female’s action scenes because, she doesn’t hold back and there is a lot of blood.”

Fukuhara, who can’t really handle gore as a viewer, wants viewers to know that they probably shouldn’t snack during The Boys. “I don’t want to be eating during her scenes… A lot of what she does to tear people apart. It was quite shocking.”

Jack Quaid, who plays totally average dude Hughie Campbell, got an up close look at The Boys’ brand of gore… literally. “In the opening episode, what happens to my girlfriend–a lot of that blood was fake, but the air cannon was very much real and that was just, like, shot at my face and that was super scary.”

Don’t think for a second that all the blood and guts are gratuitous. Showrunner Eric Kripke was simply following in the violent footsteps of the original Dynamite comic. It was writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson who established The Boys’ extreme tone. At least the mature comics helped prepare Quaid for what he was about to see on set. “The [TV] script was pretty TV-MA and then the comics, there were moments when I had to take a knee and then regroup. But I loved them and it was like the Bible for me for the show. We weren’t in Toronto yet. I wasn’t really seeing what the world looked like visually, so it was a great way to exist in that space without actually being there.”

Fukuhara admitted that despite her aversion to blood IRL (“I’ve fainted just getting a tiny shot”), she actually found the extreme effects motivating. “When you’re the one doing it, you feel so empowered and badass,” said Fukuhara, who regularly got her hands dirty on set. “It’s especially great when they have special effects going in the back. The prosthetics team was amazing on the show. Everything looked so real, when I’m just going in there with my bare hands and tearing people apart. It feels very powerful.”

Of all the gross out scenes, though, there is one that truly left everyone in the cast queasy–and that’s the Popclaw scene. Trust, you know the scene if you’ve seen it. If you haven’t, Karl Urban summed it up while describing the most shocking thing he saw on set: “I think it was a man’s skull that was crushed between the thighs of a woman as he was performing cunnilingus.”

It turns out, though, that what viewers see on Prime Video is just a fraction of the gore “I saw the unedited version,” said Laz Alonso, who plays ex-vigilante Mother’s Milk. “Put it like this: you saw the X-rated version. I saw the triple X version. They had cameras from different angles, and, you know, there wasn’t any cutting. You saw one angle the entire way through and seeing the gag when it happens, they didn’t show the gag actually happening on the show. We actually saw his head explode. Believe it or not, as crazy as it seems, it’s been toned down. The show has been toned down from the stuff that we shot, believe it or not.”

Still, working on a show as violent as The Boys leaves quite an impression. As Quaid joked after talking about getting shot in the face with a blast of fake blood, “Yeah, I’m utterly traumatized by filming this show for sure.”

Stream The Boys on Prime Video