Sometimes right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ hatred is so absurd that it almost comes off as cartoon villain dialogue. While Amazon Prime's The Boys is live-action, not animated, the show’s newest villain Firecracker is an anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist who embodies the cartoonish evil of the far right. And in a new interview, lesbian actor Valorie Curry, who plays the Firecracker, talked about why she loves playing her.
“I love that I get to play her because I think it should be one of our own that gets to make an ass out of her, that gets to satirize her and make a clown out of her,” Curry said in a recent interview with The Advocate, adding, “And also, to lampoon these people and their absurdity and their ignorance and their violence, I'm glad that it's coming from within the community, getting to take those shots.”
In 2019, Curry came out as pansexual in a post on Instagram, though she now identifies as a lesbian. “I expect all of these labels will be fluid, as we keep finding new ways to be and new language to describe ourselves,” she wrote of her identity at the time.
Although Curry enjoyed playing the role and satirizing the kind of toxic white femininity embodied by real-life right-wingers such as Lauren Boebert and Tomi Lahren, she also told The Advocate that she “kept joking, but not really, towards the end of the season that I could not wait to just run to the woods and just be a genderless gnome in the woods because I had never carried that sort of objectifying femininity before,” especially not “in a way that is so hateful.”
“I really hope that in the way that she’s portrayed in the show and the way that she is villainized and ugly, I hope that it serves that purpose,” she told the publication. “To show really what’s happening. And yes, she is a joke, but this isn’t a joke.”
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