The creator of the over-the-top Amazon series “The Boys” confessed that a gratuitously violent sequence in last week’s Season 3 finale was influenced by former President Donald Trump.
The crazy, unsettling, and scary superhero parody came to a bloody conclusion, to the cheers of onlookers cheering.
In it, Homelander, played by Antony Starr, a right-wing sociopath Captain America, reveals his heroic son to a mob of supporters straight out of a “Make America Great Again” crowd. Homelander lasers a lone protester’s skull into explicit gory parts after he throws something harmless at his son; the audience applauds.
The motivation? In his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and kill somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s just wonderful.
According to creator Eric Kripke, that quotation served as the “original idea for that moment,” to Deadline last week. Could we go as far as to really kill someone on Fifth Avenue in Homelander and then praise ourselves for it?
“Funny,” added Kripke. “It’s like we thought it was a bit satirically pushed at the time we wrote it. However, it is true that their support base grows more fervent the worsening their behavior, you know.
He admitted that the scene could have been a little unappealing.
According to Kripke, “I freely acknowledge it being a little less elegant and more urgent than what we’ve done in the past.” But I’d contend that society now is a little more urgent and less graceful. As we were creating the season, January 6 took place. We reflect on the era in which we wrote it. And January 6 absolutely terrified me. Everyone was frightened to death by it, he said.
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According to Kripke, “People don’t love Trump because of his horrible behavior; they love him because of it. He is a counter-hero. They love him more the wilder he becomes and the more he bullies others around him.
However, Trump wasn’t the only influence. The former Missouri governor Eric Greitens is one example of the trend of Republican candidates posing with firearms and seeming to threaten their rivals in campaign advertisements, according to Kripke. He is presently campaigning for the Senate and has released an advertisement urging “RINO hunting” (Republicans in name only), which is a derogatory term for centrists.
