The Boys creator Eric Kripke on that ‘wild’, graphic sex scene from season 3: ‘I thought we wouldn’t be able to show it’

The third season of superhero satire The Boys has begun streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The popular show is known as much for its dark, irreverent take on the genre as it is for constantly pushing the envelope in its depiction of violence, sex, and gore. And this season ups the ante further, somehow. The series’ showrunner Erick Kripke spoke with Hindustan Times about how the writers’ manage to up the shock value each season, and the craziest scene on the show that everyone is talking about. Also read: The Boys season 3 review: The superhero satire gets gorier and better; Jensen Ackles and Antony Starr are ‘diabolical’

Spoilers for season 3 of The Boys ahead!

The Boys follows the titular group of everyday men and women who have banded together to take the power-hungry and corrupt ‘superheroes’ down. Having fought against the mightiest superhero Homelander in the previous two seasons, The Boys are now laying low, at least in the beginning of the third season.

The opening sequence of the first episode of season 3 shows a sex scene much more graphic and creative than anything the show has put out. It revolves around a superhero named Termite, who has the power to shrink himself to a tiny size. The scene shows Termite engaging in intercourse with his partner when he decides to shrink down and go inside his partner’s sexual organ, stimulating it from the inside. The show manages to depict everything in the scene in pretty graphic detail. It only gets crazier from there on as Termite sneezes, growing to his normal size and accidentally exploding his partner.

Eric Kripke says this is the scene he was worried about being censored by the streaming platform or the production houses behind the show. “I would say that would be the first 15 minutes of the first episode, the entire sequence with Termite, is a wild, wild sequence. No one really gave us notes not to do it but when you really think about just the production logistics it takes and to pull that off is so insane. I thought we wouldn’t be able to depict it,” he says. Eric, who is also one of the co-writers of the show, adds that he regards the sequence as the ‘craziest thing’ ever done on screen. He says, “To me, that’s one of the craziest things not just we have done but I think anyone has done. I mean who sits down and figures out how to pull off that sequence. It’s certainly one of my favourite sequences we have ever done.”

In an interaction with HT prior to the release of the third season, cast member Claudia Doumit had said, “I think that every season: ‘How are they going to top that?’ And they top that.” The viewers agree that The Boys keeps finding new ways to shock the audience. But as per Eric, it is never intentional. He shares, “We never set out to try and top ourselves. I think you do end up with something big and stupid. The saying in the writers’ room is ‘don’t go bigger, go deeper’. And so each season, we try and challenge ourselves in how we can dig deeper into the characters and this world and what would it really be like, and that naturally leads to shocking moments. But we never set to do that.”

In fact, Eric says that Amazon Prime Video has almost never had to step in to censor something they are trying to depict on screen, which is something, given all the crazy depictions of sex and violence The Boys has managed to show over the years. “There’s a lot of self policing. Amazon has been really great about it. We almost never get notes that we can’t show something. We did for the first time this year actually. But almost never! We self police because I really don’t want the show to be gratuitous or shocking for its own sake. That would be playing it cheap. As you can imagine, my writers pitch me the craziest thing every single day. But if it doesn’t help advance the story or tell us something about the character, then we don’t do it. If it’s grounded in a character, then we can get totally nuts,” he says. When asked about the note they did receive this year, Eric remains tight-lipped but lets slip something. “The note we got was not ‘you can’t do it’. It was: ‘Please don’t do it again’,” he says with a laugh.

Before The Boys, Eric was best known for creating the hit series Supernatural. And The Boys season 3 sees him reunite with Supernatural star Jensen Ackles, who has joined the show. Talking about their reunion, he says, “It was so fun. I haven’t really been running Supernatural for a decade. So, it had been a minute since I had really written words that Jensen was performing. It felt like coming home. He is so good and versatile, and I have seen all those facets and so, it was really fun because you could write with a lot of confidence.”

Apart from Jensen, another Supernatural alum on The Boys is Jim Beaver, who plays US Defense Secretary Robert Singer. When asked if there was a chance completing the reunion by getting other Supernatural actors Jared Padalecki and Jeffrey Dean Morgan on The Boys, Eric laughs and says, “I would put Jared on this show in a heartbeat. Jared is between his show Walker and now he is producing a spin-off. He is creating his own empire over there. Every season, I ask about Jeffrey Dean Morgan and he is always busy. He is the lead of a Walking Dead spin-off right now. The questions are always asked but the answers are always: ‘They’re way too busy’. But I would put all of them on the show in a heartbeat.”

The first three episodes of The Boys season 3 began streaming on Prime Video from June 3. The subsequent five episodes will release weekly every Friday.