Karl Urban and ‘The Boys’ cast on white supremacy in a ‘diabolical’ Season 2

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Are you sick of superheroes yet? Because The Boys are — and they’re coming back this September to take down a few corporately sponsored “supes” in Season 2 of the bloody, vulgar, irreverent comic-based series on Amazon Prime.

The show pits a group of everyday people — the Boys — against the Seven, a cynical team of superhero sellouts led by Homelander, a phony patriot and blond-haired narcissist with all of Superman’s powers and none of his morality.

Season 1 of the show mocked today’s big-budget superhero movie culture while also tackling issues such as faith and sexual abuse in the era of #MeToo.

Season 2 will build on those themes while taking on other big issues such as white supremacy and racism, in a storyline said to fit together well with the current protests against anti-Black racism.

Global News spoke to actors Karl Urban (Butcher) and Laz Alonso (MM) about what’s in store for the anti-superhero Boys in Season 2. In a separate interview, Global News also caught up with Antony Starr (Homelander) and newcomer Aya Cash, who plays a cruel new superhero named Stormfront on The Boys.

Karl Urban (Butcher) and Laz Alonso (MM)

Global News: It’s your second time around with The Boys now. What’s different about Season 2?
Karl Urban: We’re going to go deeper and really dive into these characters and what makes them tick. But I also feel that — and Laz agrees with me — that we also went bigger in scope and scale. The action and the set pieces in Season 2… it’s ballistic. We can’t wait.
Laz Alonso: Definitely a lot more blood this season. They definitely got a bigger blood budget, I would say that.

GN: Amazon did release footage of a bloody scene with a whale…
LA: There’s more, trust me.

GN: Karl, your character Butcher was obsessed with Homelander for “killing” his wife in Season 1. Then he finds out she’s alive. How does he re-orient himself for Season 2?
KU: Now for Butcher the focus becomes, OK, I’ve got to get my wife back. How do I do that? And he needs the help of the Boys to do that. And unfortunately at the end of Season 1, he turned his back on them. So he really has to deal with his failure and earn the trust of the Boys to move forward.

GN: Laz, you play the grounded member of the Boys. How do you approach that when you’ve got all these fantastical elements involved in the show?
LA: At one time I thought, what a great opportunity to play this character because he actually is grounding every other character. So in many respects, he gets to be the hub of the wheel. But I also realized that he became the writers’ favourite character to have sh-t happen to him.
KU: Ha!
LA: When you’ve got somebody that’s so wound up, and so serious, you like to see stuff wrap around his neck. And I’m not going to tell you what wraps around my neck — and hopefully Karl won’t because he enjoys that episode the most. Sometimes I think he’s responsible for what happened to my character, but I’m not going to accuse him of that without any proof. But let’s just say there are going to be a lot of memes.
KU: What this season effectively does is take away what is most precious from each and every character. With Butcher, it’s his wife. With Starlight, it’s her religion. With Homelander, it’s his position within the Seven, and the public perception of him. With Hugh Campbell, it’s Starlight. With MM it’s definitely his masculinity. [Laughs]
LA: It’s not his masculinity!
KU: You’re just so touchy about it. I love this.
LA: With MM, he’s basically coming to terms with a certain disease that he inherited from his father and he reveals that in Season 2, which is a little bit of backstory that you’re going to see.

GN: That sounds different from the comics, where he gets strong because his mother breastfed him with a sort of super-powered breast milk. MM is short for “Mother’s Milk.”
LA: The story about his father is accurate with the comic, but his relationship with his mother is different, so you won’t see any breast suckling for his mother’s milk.
KU: We’re actually really blessed in the show because it’s quite a collaborative environment. Quite often scripts will evolve along the way. In Laz’s case, he’s really wonderfully constructed a beautiful sequence of dialogue that delves right into MM’s backstory, and it’s one of my favourite scenes in the entire season.
LA: Thanks, brother. Did you also collaborate with the writers as far as what wraps around my neck?
KU: [Laughs]

GN: On that note, you guys have both worked on projects with a lot of CGI effects. Karl, you did Lord of the Rings and Thor: Ragnarok. Laz, you were a blue cat person in Avatar. How does that compare to more the more practical effects in The Boys?
KU: Unlike a lot of modern productions that heavily rely on CGI, The Boys kind of went old school. We had these big action set pieces, and they had us in the middle doing it.

In Episode 3, the Boys are speeding along in a speedboat, jumping waves, and we had a helicopter hovering above and actually filming us doing it. In many productions that just wouldn’t happen, they would have doubles in there and do a face replace.

They also built this 50-foot animatronic sperm whale that we Boys smashed into. And it was a functional set they had inside the whale. It was crazy.

GN: Who’s having the most fun on set — the Boys or the Supes?
LA: The Boys, hands down. And that’s not because I’m one of the Boys. There are two shows in one, and the crew says we’re the most fun.

Usually, they shoot Supes one day and the Boys another, unless there’s a day we’re fighting each other. But on the sperm whale day, the Boys shot in the morning and later the Supes show up on the beach. And Jack Quaid (who plays Hughie) and I decided to crash their set and just hang out and see what it was like, a day with the Supes.

No comparison, bro. I’ll take the Boys, any and every day.

GN: We’ve had almost 20 years of superhero movies. Everybody’s familiar with those big-budget franchises, but this show really pulls all of that apart — both the fictional heroes and the corporate machine around them in our real world. What makes this show work in 2020 when it might not have back in 2005?
KU: The show is set in a hyper-reality, imagining if superheroes existed, and then imbuing them with the same faults and flaws that we see in modern celebrity culture. But also within that framework, it has the opportunity to explore contemporary social issues like sexual harassment, racism, white supremacy and corporate greed.

So it’s not just this fun, irreverent, diabolical, graphic comic book show. It’s actually quite layered.

GN: You mentioned white supremacy. I understand that’s a theme in this season. Will people find some echoes of that in the conversations we’re seeing today, especially around the Black Lives Matter movement?
LA: One hundred per cent, bro. We got to watch Season 2 during COVID and during the protests, and it was eerie how on-point and timely it was with what’s happening right now. Obviously we’re a superhero show, but thematically, it touches on many of the points that we’re seeing activists discuss today. We’re hearing both sides of the conversation which, through Aya Cash’s character Stormfront, she voices some of the opposing views, perspectives and fears.

Aya Cash (Stormfront) and Antony Starr (Homelander)

Global News: Antony, Homelander was really the standout villain of Season 1. What can we expect from Homelander in Season 2?
Antony Starr: At the end of Season 1, Homelander had taken some pretty bold moves to establish himself as leader of the Seven. He’s used to being on the front foot and used to being in control, and Season 2 is all about him being pushed out of control and having to be very reactionary. And that’s not a comfortable position for him to be in. It really sends him on a spiral and a very internal journey into the dark recess of mind and soul.

GN: You both got to work with Giancarlo Esposito (a.k.a. Gus Fring from Breaking Bad) this season. He often plays an intimidating guy. What was that like?
AS: He’s a lovely man. He’s not intimidating. His body of work is pretty intimidating, but the man himself is so sweet and so nice and such a team player. And he’s just so damn good! I had a bunch of scenes with him and it was just fun. It was awesome.

GN: There was a big moment in Season 1 when Homelander basically abandoned a plane full of people to die. That was the “Oh crap, this is evil Superman” moment. Is there a moment like that in this season?
AS: It’s Homelander. He is not the good guy. He does pretty horrible things, but to be honest, Stormfront comes in and makes Homelander look like a bit of a slap in the face with a Twinkie. She’s a pretty despicable little creature, and she carries the load of despicable acts in Season 2.

GN: Season 1 used some despicable moments to look at a lot of bigger issues, like faith, violence or #MeToo. I understand white supremacy becomes a big issue in this season. What can you tell us about that, and how does it mesh with the conversation we’re seeing around Black Lives Matter in 2020?
Aya Cash: We do deal with white supremacy in this season, and unfortunately that’s not a new issue. The conversation may be spotlighted in this moment, but it’s something embedded in the history of this country. What the writers have done is looked around at the world and written that. And it just so happens that in this moment, the world is looking back.
AS: I think it’s important to remember as well that there is a moral compass within the show, and there’s not much ambiguity about what is good and bad. The entire team is very conscious of making sure that there are repercussions for people who do wrong. The issues we’re discussing are very timely and nothing is glorified.

GN: Aya, you play Stormfront, who is a male neo-Nazi in the comics. How much attention do you pay to that portrayal, since Stormfront has obviously been reworked for the TV show?
AC: I read some of the comics to get into the world, just to sort of see where that source material was. But really, I feel like The Boys the TV show is a different beast than the graphic novels. It sort of takes the spirit of the graphic novels and translates it for now, so I almost didn’t want to go too far because I’m doing something different.

GN: Why don’t we talk about the costume —
AC: OK, the costume’s all fake! Those are also not my boobs. The costume is amazing! It’s a whole new body that I zip into with lots and lots  — much like Homelander, Homelander and I have the most silicone in the entire show. We are built differently.

AS: There’s no room for anything in those things, and you know, they’re built for the aesthetics, not the ergonomic function, so they’re pretty uncomfortable. Aya was a trooper though, man. She donned it every day like the rest of us, and sucked it all in and sucked it up and got on with it.

GN: And I imagine there must be some getting used to when it comes to ‘flying.’
AC: I love flying though! That was surprising. Everyone warned me over and over again how uncomfortable flying would be but I do aerial yoga, so I’m used to being upside down and having pressure on your hips, which is where you get clipped in. I really love the flying stuff. I think it was thrilling.

AC: He has a plug-in to his butt to keep him cool in his supersuit. What do the Boys got? They don’t have aqua conditioning or whatever you call it.
AS: I do have basically a radiator going around underneath. It pumps water through there.

GN: What was the most fun scene to shoot?
AS: My favourite scene is the whale scene — the Deep’s return in Episode 3. I read it and I thought it was too much. I swear to God, the moment I saw it I was howling with laughter and crying from the moment I saw these little shark fins cutting through the water. I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s coming!’

GN: I hear the Boys have more fun on set than the Supes. 
AS: Who did you hear that from, the Boys? They like to think because the title of the show is The Boys that they’re the rockstars of the show. It just ain’t true. Look how much time they spend covered in sh–ty fake blood and horrible substances with what they do. We’re like pampered cats and we stroll around in these fancy outfits… [Laughs]

No, we have a lot of fun, and it’s a great show to work on.

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You can watch ‘The Boys’ Season 2 on Amazon Prime Video beginning Sep. 4. New episodes will be added weekly.

[This interview has been edited and condensed.]