The Boys Creator Eric Kripke Isn’t Trying to Predict the Future
Maybe it’s what America deserves that one of the most relevant and prescient shows about the state of the nation, now mired in the second stage of the Trump era, also features exploded penises, superpowered orgies, and enough blood to paint every state red. But for as much as The Boys, Amazon Prime Video’s subversive superhero comedy, seems tailor-made for our current reality, its creator, Eric Kripke, says that wasn’t the initial plan.
“It was really meant to be a celebrity satire, and it was going to be a satire of Hollywood,” Kripke told Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau in an Emmys FYC conversation hosted by Prime Video and Vulture, adding that Seth Rogen, one of the show’s producers, had a pitch for the original vision of the show that boiled it down to “What if Iron Man was Robert Downey Jr.?”
“Then Trump got elected,” Kripke recalls. “We had this observation of Huh, this is at the intersection of authoritarianism and celebrity. Homelander is inherently fascist but has such stage presence. And the minute we realized that, we were like, Oh shit. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. I did not. But we stumbled onto the perfect metaphor for the moment, and we had to run in that direction as far as we could.”
And indeed The Boys has run very, very far, to the point where Kripke says there are things in the upcoming fifth and final season — which has the psychotic, fascist Homelander openly taking control of America — that have “sort of already come to pass.”
“We wrote all that before the [2024] election,” Kripke admits. “We had, in hindsight, naïve hopes.”
We are in an era where the rise of authoritarianism is by no means uniquely American, but I’ve always thought that Donald Trump is a uniquely American authoritarian. Of course he would be rich and famous and a celebrity. What do you think about the connection between the two and how they work together as the season has gone on?
We realized the biggest sin that the superheroes could commit was hypocrisy. That’s something that celebrities and politicians have in common. So where we started was whatever mask they have onstage, it’s always the dead opposite when they take their mask off. So Homelander is so genial, a Superman god-savior, but he’s just a raging sociopath. A-Train is a “gee, shucks” cocky athlete, but then behind closed doors he’s taking performance enhancers and is terrified that he’s going to lose. We built the characters as hypocrites.
We’ve learned over the past decade — and satirize it in the show well — that building that support is partly about politics, but it’s partly about entertainment. It seems like there’s such a premium in the show on making sure that all the supes are as entertaining as possible to the public.
You won’t be surprised to hear that we catch a lot of shit online, especially from people on the right. My point has always been I am from a small town in Ohio. I have no quarrel with you — my problem is with these people up top who are telling you that they have your best interest at heart, and they do not. They’re just riling you up, and they’re turning us all against each other, and they’re doing it for gain and profit. Both sides are doing it, by the way, but mostly that side. That’s what I find so despicable: You’re tearing apart the country so you can amass a little more money and power in another gold toilet.
In general, how do you balance drawing from real-world events without being too on the nose?
Oh, you don’t think we’re too on the nose? That’s so nice of you. Did Amazon tell you to say that?
One of the requirements of the job is we’re news junkies. Usually what would happen would be someone would come in angry when we were in the middle of writing. For instance, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, we were all angry, but I don’t pretend to know what the women in the room were feeling. They’re rightfully furious. How can we write about it? How can you put that into the show so that you can communicate that? So that’s where Annie having had an abortion story line came from. We actually try to process the political stuff internally. We’re not just like, “That’d be hilarious!” We do that more with celebrity stuff, like the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial.
No fascist takeover would be complete without a giant propaganda machine. Vought is no exception. There’s an especially darkly funny moment toward the end of season four when Ryan, Homelander’s son, appears in the Avenue V Christmas special, which is basically a Fox News version of Sesame Street. Why did you want Ryan to be part of Vought’s propaganda machine?
This has a dark backstory. One memory that always really stuck with me that I would bring up in the room a lot is when I was at the Holocaust museum and one of the exhibits was a board game for kids from ca. 1939. It was a Candy Land–style game, and you had to flush Germany of the Jews and get them out of the country. The Jews looked like rats. It was a popular game for children!
We think of George Orwell’s 1984 — or at least we did. Now we’re actually getting a front-row seat as to how propaganda really works. It’s entertaining and it’s slick. But one part that people don’t talk about is propaganda toward children is a very important part of it. So I kept asking, “Can we do Homeland Youth? How do we get the children into it?” Because that’s such an insidious part of the playbook. The puppets were not our idea; it was in the spinoff show Gen V. I just love them so much. “We have to use these Sesame Street puppets!”
You introduced Firecracker in season four. This is a supe version of a right-wing TV host, though I saw you said the inspiration for Firecracker was not a right-wing TV host but a right-wing politician, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Close enough.
Also Lauren Boebert and Laura Loomer. What we found interesting was there is Trump, of course, but then there are these highly concentrated Trump minions. If he’s orange juice, they’re like concentrated orange juice. So filled with the Kool-Aid and just so rambunctious. What if we gave Homelander somebody like that who is even a little more radical than he is? What a great propaganda mouthpiece that would be.
There are incentives for people in the party or in the administration to behave like Trump because they know that’s how they advance. They also know that’s how they can make money and win the election. You can see the transformation. Some people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, were always there, but Marco Rubio is turning MAGA as he becomes more of a supplicant.
You said it better than me. It’s like it became WWE wrestling at some point. These characters are coming in and putting on a character that they’re doing. Valorie Curry, who plays Firecracker, is always really careful about when Firecracker is in a private moment. She loses 80 percent of the accent. She’s still from Florida, but she’s a totally different, more thoughtful person. Then she goes onstage, and she’s frothing at the mouth. It’s the culture-warrior thing: They’re all turning themselves into these culture warriors.
This season marks another political shift that has real-life parallels. Everyone who was trying to stop Homelander thought they could turn the public against him by exposing his crimes, his lies, and his true self. Last season, Homelander comes to the realization that he can get away with just about anything as long as he has enough devoted followers. Was that always the plan, or was that based on where the real-world events were going?
We ended season three with him murdering somebody in broad daylight and then the crowd cheered. There was probably a certain amount of inspiration from someone saying they could do whatever they wanted on Fifth Avenue and people would cheer for them.
One way you could track The Boys is in the methodical psychological breakdown of Homelander’s level of sanity. Season one, he is a little crazy. Season two, he is a little crazier. So we’re at season four out of five, when he has the realization that he doesn’t have to wear the mask. He’s this monster taking off handcuffs that he had been wearing up to that point because it was important to him that everyone thought he was this very genial Superman type. Then he realizes, Oh, the people don’t even want that. They want me to stoke their fears and hatred. Okay, I’m going to go do that.
We’ve been going through this with Trump for a decade now. He does something and you’re like, Surely this will turn the base against him and this will be it for him … and then it actually just gins everything up more.
We try to make it clear that the people who love him? Homelander absolutely despises them. Would not piss on them if they were on fire. They’re disgusting. They’re beneath him. That’s where the real hypocrisy comes in in the later seasons. I always wanted to do this moment that we never could quite fit in, which is, like, he’s shaking all these people’s hands and then behind closed doors, he’s using Purell every single time.
You do a great job of portraying authoritarian movements as not just a vehicle to gain power but a vehicle for belonging, for grievance, for vengeance, for working through past trauma. Can you talk about the story you want to tell through the show about what motivates people’s descent into fascism?
We did as much research as we could because we were really interested in why people go down these rabbit holes, to the point of separating ties from their families. It gets so extreme, and it happens so suddenly. Where does it come from? I’m sure there are a million reasons, but the one that I thought was so interesting, we actually had Firecracker give a speech about in episode two. People are scared and frustrated. They’re losing their jobs; they can’t afford their groceries. They know people who are being ravaged by Oxy or fentanyl. Mainstream politicians up to that point did a pretty piss-poor job of saying, “We really understand, and we’re on it.” Suddenly, voices come in to say that the reason you’re in that position is because there’s this great evil that is attacking you. You’re not helpless and poor, actually. You’re a warrior fighting this incredible evil, and it’s happening in the basement of the pizza shop, and it’s happening with Tom Hanks and Oprah, and you can fight it, too — all you’ve got to do is donate to my campaign and come to my rallies. That’s really intoxicating. They’re offering people power and agency that they’re just not getting from other sources. It’s not like they’re bad people; they’re scared and lonely people, and the powers that be know how to use that to their own ends.
You have a lot of Homelander’s backstory in this season as well as some of the other supes. We all have things in our past that have caused trauma, but when someone is really, really powerful and has a past where there’s a lot of trauma, oftentimes we all suffer for that: If Donald Trump’s father had just hugged him as a kid, or if people had hung out with Elon Musk more, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. That happens with a lot of the supes. They all have something in their background that they’re trying to compensate for.
Part of that comes from me having a hard time writing a straight-up villain. I get confused by someone who wakes up in the morning and is like, “I’m going to do some evil today!” That’s a hard psyche to justify, compared to waking up and saying, “I’m going to do the right thing,” or “I’m going to scratch this itch in my psyche that I just can’t help myself from scratching.”
With that backstory scene for Homelander, I really wanted to explore how he doesn’t come out of the blue. That’s a product of upbringing and poor choices and the mistakes of the generation in front of you. This trauma keeps bonking around through all the generations until you just make the choice to try to break it. Antony Starr is so insane in that episode. He makes a guy masturbate in front of everyone, and if the guy can’t reach completion, he’s going to laser his penis off, and he manages to make you feel for Homelander. That’s a magic trick that you’re like, Oh God, I really feel terrible for what you went through, as he’s committing the most atrocious torture on these people. I always say to him and to everyone that I do not need anyone to be sympathetic to Homelander. In fact, they should not be — but we should make an effort to understand him.
A lot of the characters this season have these personal arcs that play out between all the chaos. How do you thread those very human moments through a show that’s so explosive?
It’s actually the most important part of it. The show takes wild, hairpin turns in tone. It’ll go from a satire to super-violent to these insanely sexual moments to a heartbreaking, emotional scene. The only way the audience would ever go along on that ride is if they love the characters and they want to follow the characters through that insane Disney-like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. We need to love those people.
It takes us about three and a half weeks to break an episode. We probably spend two of those weeks doing nothing but talking about characters and psychology and motivation. Where do we want them to start? Where do we want them to end? How do we get there? And once we know that, the scenes start to coalesce. If you watch carefully, almost every scene moves a character forward emotionally. The comic is way more violent and explicit than the show by a factor of a lot, so we always knew the show was going to be outrageous and subversive. But I said the most subversive thing the show could do would be to make you cry. Because that’s the last thing you’re expecting for this show.
The season ends with Homelander essentially in charge of a country where martial law has been declared. Is this choice an attempt to stay ahead of reality, or is it a prediction of where we might be when season five starts?
I mean, we wrote all that before the election. We had, in hindsight, naïve hopes. Heading into the final, climactic season, it’s time to blow the doors off. It’s time to change the world. We kept threatening that Homelander is going to take over the country. It’s now or never. At the time, we were like, “Well, let’s make it a cautionary tale. Hopefully everyone will say, Whoo! We dodged that bullet.” And then we all got hit with the bullet. So we’ll see. I won’t spoil season five, but there’s a lot of stuff that we were writing in season five that has sort of already come to pass. People come up to me like, “Will you just please write a fucking happy ending?” And I’m like, “I don’t really have control over any of this.”