The Boys Scenes That Were Seriously Gross To Film
"The Boys" will go down in history as one of the raunchiest shows ever made. In the very first episode the show went all in on graphic content. Throughout the years "The Boys" has shown us everything from exploding heads to marine life fellatio. The explicit content really comes with the territory. If you want to tell a story about larger-than-life superheroes being the worst people imaginable, you can't shy away from their misdeeds.
Showrunner Eric Kripke seems thrilled to explore the gross side of superpowers, and Prime Video seems happy to let him do it. After Season 1 aired, Kripke told a Reddit AMA, "There was ONE SCENE that Amazon said F*** NO you have to cut it." That later became the post-credits scene of Season 2. Apparently nothing is off the table now. Season 3 gave us "Herogasm," an episode exactly as gross as it sounds, and after that, truly anything could happen.
Everything in "The Boys" is joyously disgusting to watch, but the people working on the show have a much different experience. Getting covered in gore and bodily fluids is all in a day's work for the show's stars, and the crew never gets to stop crafting one grotesque image after another. For all of them, it's just the daily grind, but some shifts at work are seriously grosser than others.
Losing Robin
The first few minutes of "The Boys" really sets the tone for the entire series. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is walking down the street with his girlfriend Robin (Jess Salgueiro), and the two of them are talking about their future together. They stop for a kiss that proves fatal when A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) literally runs through Robin. She explodes into a spray of red that leaves Hughie soaked in blood. The scene is both heartbreaking and deeply disgusting.
Quaid luckily didn't have to live through the heartbreak to get the scene filmed, but he did have to experience Hughie's gory shower. "The Boys" takes advantage of CGI when it's needed, but plenty of the show's effects are practical. In an interview with Patton Oswalt, Quaid explained that filming the Robin scene involved having a blood cannon shot directly into his face, saying, "I've become something of an expert on getting fake gore on me, which is something I never thought would be part of my life, but it definitely is now."
Quaid also gave some tips for dealing with all that blood once filming stops. A standard shower just isn't going to cut it. Surprisingly, shaving cream does a good job of getting the blood off. Rubbing your body down with Barbasol isn't as gross as getting sprayed with the blood itself, but it's not exactly a fun time.
Running through the subway
Homelander (Antony Starr) and The Seven get to spend most of their time hanging out in the plush offices at Vought, but Hughie and the rest of The Boys aren't so lucky. They spend their time in the seedy corners of the world, and in Season 1 they end up in a particularly unpleasant location. After escaping from her cage in the Triad's basement, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) runs off through the city. At one point The Boys end up chasing her through subway tunnels that look pretty gross on screen but were definitely much worse in person.
"Season 1 was probably the dirtiest season for 'The Boys,'" Laz Alonso, who plays Boys second-in-command M.M., told GQ. He cited Kimiko's subway chase as a prime example. They filmed the season in real abandoned subway tunnels, and after years of disuse the tunnels were beyond nasty. The actors didn't just contend with dirt, grime, and leftover trash but also serious rat and mouse infestations. Everyone went through the gross together, but no one had it as rough as Fukuhara. Since Kimiko had just escaped imprisonment, she hadn't found the time to get any shoes. The crew provided Fukuhara with some prosthetic feet to wear, but when those didn't work she ended up running through the subway barefoot.
An uncomfortable gill experience
Anyone who stars in a show like "The Boys" needs to build up a thick skin and a strong stomach. There are plenty of moments in the series — like blood sprays and rat-filled tunnels — that are physically gross. There's an equal amount of moments that are emotionally revolting too. It's one of those scenes that made Chace Crawford very uncomfortable.
Crawford plays The Deep, who just happens to be one of the grossest characters on the show. As the series has gone on, The Deep has become something of a comedic character. Season 3 got some mileage out of playing up his attraction to a particular sea creature. In Season 1, however, The Deep's creepiness was significantly more ominous, as he raped Starlight (Erin Moriarty) when he first met her. Then in Season 2, he got something of a comeuppance that grossed out everyone.
The scene in question features The Deep bringing a woman home only to find out that she has an obsessive fascination with the gills on his chest. She assaults him much like he did to Starlight, and filming the moment made Crawford sick to his stomach. He had to lay underneath a prosthetic while a room full of people watched a woman have her way with his gills. "It literally made me nauseous, I'm not going to lie," Crawford told MTV in 2020.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
The whale
"The Boys" might have one of the most committed special effects departments in all of television. It's not just that the team develops great CGI visual effects to make superpowers like flight and laser vision come to life. It's also that they'll go to absolutely ridiculous lengths to make the show's big moments feel as real as possible. They really take practical effects to an entirely new level.
"The Boys" crew pulled off a wild whale scene in Season 2, going above and beyond on multiple fronts. In the scene The Boys crash a speedboat into a whale, lodging themselves inside its internal organs in spectacularly gory fashion. The crew knew that the scene needed more than CGI to work, so they constructed an actual replica whale. They could have stopped there, but instead they went a step further. They did a deep dive into whale anatomy and learned all about the animal's internal organs, so that the replicas they created for the show could be as accurate as possible.
The next time you're watching the whale scene, just take a second to appreciate that basically everything you're seeing on screen is real. All together, the crew spent five months constructing the whale and its innards. Then Jack Quaid and some of his costars spent hours sitting inside the bleeding replica to get the perfect shots.
Head popping
Everyone working on "The Boys" gets to participate in their fair share of grossness. The actors have to put themselves in physically disgusting scenarios, while the writers and crew have to consider the logistics of putting those scenarios together in the first place. To pull off the shocking conclusion to the Season 2 episode "Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker," someone had to figure out what it would look like if a person's head exploded.
The head-popping incident is seriously stomach-turning, but it might be easier to watch if you know that some of what plays out on screen is computer-generated. Most of the gory explosions in the scene are CGI, but the first two deaths were carried out entirely with practical effects. VFX supervisor Stephen Fleet planned out the entire scene, and he knew that the first two head pops were the most important. His team built headless dummies and thought about the best way to create exploded brains. They eventually decided that using mashed-up bananas mixed with fake blood was the way to go. The dummies were caked with bloody bananas to get the shot, and we have to imagine at least a few crew members were put off their favorite breakfast fruit for a while.
PETA-approved octopus consumption
Season 3 included some of the grossest scenes that "The Boys" has ever shown us. The season has enough sex, gore, and emotional damage to last a lifetime, and no character is safe. In one particularly disturbing scene, The Deep is forced to eat a live octopus. It's hard to watch, both because of The Deep's palpable distress and because we have to watch the whole thing play out second by painful second.
"The Boys" fans aren't the only ones who suffered thanks to that scene. It also briefly ruined pancakes for Chace Crawford. He had to eat a rice cake filled with syrup, so that the VFX artists could cover the cake with a CGI octopus in post-production. If you know anything about working in film, you know that scenes need to be shot multiple times. After eating so many syrup cakes, Crawford had to take a break from pancakes for a while.
Fans are thankful that "The Boys" didn't use a real octopus in the scene — unlike that other famous octopus-eating scene in "Oldboy" – and they aren't the only ones. PETA gave the show its "Tech Not Terror" Award for opting to use a CGI animal. Of course, the person most thankful for the lack of a real octopus is probably Crawford himself.
Introducing the Termite
By far the grossest scene in "The Boys" Season 3, and arguably the grossest in the entire show, is Termite's (Brett Geddes) introduction. The Termite has powers similar to Ant-Man, and in typical "The Boys" fashion, we don't see him using his abilities to fight crime. Instead, in the opening of Season 3, Termite shrinks down and walks into his boyfriend's penis. It's all fun and games until he sneezes, accidentally expanding himself to full size and killing his lover in the process.
Eric Kripke told Entertainment Weekly how this over-the-top scene came to be, and the one strange restriction the show faced while making it. Kripke said that they initially planned for Termite to go inside someone's butt, but when they remembered that Translucent (Alex Hassell) had been killed by a bomb in his rear end, they decided to go a different direction. To get the scene right, they constructed a 30-foot-long penis for Geddes to step inside, but they ran into one other problem. They weren't allowed to show an erect penis. "We had to design in all these wrinkles to make it clear that it wasn't erect," Kripke said. "So, anyway, it's exhibit 7,023 why I love this job."
Super vomit
All of The Boys have a vendetta against supes, but Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) hates them more than anyone else. That's what makes his character arc in Season 3 so surprising. Butcher decides that the only way to really fight back is to become a supe himself, so he uses Temporary V to give himself powers. Though he and Hughie both end up enjoying some superpowered hijinks, Temp V comes with a gross side effect.
After flexing their superpowered muscles, both Butcher and Hughie projectile vomit a mix of bile and their lunch. The puke is colored bright green, implying that the color of Temp V really mixes into whatever else is in someone's stomach at the time. Any scene with puke is as gross as it is funny, and the actors feel the contradiction more than anyone.
Jack Quaid shared a selfie on Instagram showing off his jar of green vomit. It turns out that the green puke is another classic "The Boys" practical effect that requires the actors to get pretty gross themselves. Don't worry about Quaid too much, though. "I promise it tastes a lot less disgusting than it looks," he wrote in his post.
The Deep's octopus romance
The Deep is a play on Aquaman, and "The Boys" has found quite a few ways to get humor and horror out of his admittedly silly abilities. In earlier seasons The Deep remained unwaveringly committed to helping sea creatures, even though no one at Vaught cared and he wasn't particularly good at saving fish in the first place. Season 3 pulls The Deep in two extreme directions: First he's forced to eat a live octopus, even though he can understand its pleading for life. Then he overcorrects in the grossest way possible.
In "Herogasm," Starlight stumbles into a room and finds The Deep having sex with an octopus. It's scenes like this that have led Chase Crawford to admit that the first thing he does after getting a new script for "The Boys" is get his therapist on the phone. Once his feelings are back in check, Crawford is ready for anything, but the octopus sex scene was especially uncomfortable.
Obviously the octopus itself was CGI, but in real life Crawford had to wear a fake octopus rig that weighed 40 pounds. Throughout the scene, VFX supervisor Stephen Fleet tried to help out by making adjustments to the rig. That meant Crawford would lay on the bed while Fleet cut off an arm or two, and then Crawford had to go back to pretending to have sex with the makeshift monstrosity while the crew watched. Talk about an awkward day at work.
Frenchie's torture scene
Frenchie (Tomer Capone) is usually the guy standing next to the grossest thing on set. He's helping wipe the gore off Hughie or walking into the aftermath of a particularly violent supe incident. Sometimes he's the guy causing the gross scene to play out, like when he designed the bomb that eventually blew up Translucent. Season 3 finally gave Capone his chance to be deeply uncomfortable on set.
Franchie and Kimiko actually miss out on the titular action of "Herogasm." Instead they're dealing with Nina (Katia Winter). She kidnaps Frenchie, Kimiko, and Cherie (Jordana Lajoie) and tortures Frenchie before forcing him to choose which woman to kill. Things turn out all right for Frenchie, but Capone got to feel the brutality of the episode more than anyone.
Capone spent an entire day filming the scenes where Frenchie is stripped and tortured, but he told Digital Spy that there was one aspect of the experience that really made it so uncomfortable to shoot. "It's one thing being naked all day, with you chained to a pole for 14 hours," he said, "but it's being covered with this gooey blood." At the very least Capone and Jack Quaid can now trade tips about the best way to get fake blood out of your hair after it's had an extended workday to soak in.
Bringing Herogasm to life
It should surprise no one at all that the making of Season 3's "Herogasm" was incredibly gross. The episode is set in the midst of an annual superhero orgy, and it goes well beyond the usual R-rated content of "The Boys." There's more nudity and fake bodily fluids in this one episode than in entire shows, and there's more superpowered sex than Tony Stark has ever even fantasized about.
Inverse talked to the people behind "Herogasm," and everyone had their own takes on the experience. Most had never seen so many nude extras in one place, with Erin Moriarty saying, "I can never unsee what I saw." Meanwhile Antony Starr, who didn't have to be on set through most of the explicit scenes, said, "The stories that I heard from people on set were quite a thing ... I'm glad I missed it."
It was showrunner Eric Kripke who got real about the most distressing part of the entire experience: COVID. He had to get the episode made while also making sure that all the actors and crew members on set stayed safe. "The logistics are horrifying because you need to make sure that everyone is behaving properly and professionally," he said. Fortunately, everyone made it out alive, and the crew somehow found enough fake bodily fluids to get every gross scene finished.