[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of The Boys! Read at your own risk]
If fans had somehow forgotten how intensely gross Prime Video’s The Boys can be in the 18 months since we’ve seen new episodes, they were quickly reminded in the Season 3 premiere. Frenchie (Tomer Kapon) and Kamiko (Karen Fukuhara) are sent on a mission to capture a specific supe, Termite (Brett Geddes) — The Boys‘ universe equivalent to Ant-Man. They find him at a rowdy party after he’s snorted a bunch of cocaine, shrunk himself down, and… crawled into his lover’s penis. It’s clearly a thing the two have done before and Termite is on his way to the prostate when he has a cocaine-induced sneeze and ends up exploding his partner in half.
No part of this scenario is left to the imagination, from Termite shrinking down, to him jumping into the tip of his partner’s penis, and even stroking the walls once he got inside. It is absolutely one of the grossest and most explicit things the show has ever done (and last season they impaled a whale with a speed boat) and they spared no expense in doing it. While Termite jumping into the tip was done primarily with VFX, the interior penis scenes required a practical set.
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“My favorite thing about that scene is that was a real penis that we built. VFX sweetened it up, but that is an 11-foot high, 20-foot long, actual, practical penis built at great expense,” series creator and executive producer Eric Kripke explained to TV Guide. “It’s one of the reasons I love my job.”
Karen Fukuhara, who wasn’t in the penis scene specifically but enters the room after Termite’s partner is already dead, got to see the giant penis in person and confirmed the gross factor, saying it was even worse than the beached whale she and Kamiko’s vigilante crew were stuck in for days during the Season 2 shoot.
“It was a closed set so I wasn’t there to see [them film] anything, but I got to visit the set. I had a little set visit day. It was all lubed up,” she said. “It was a little more jarring than the whale. Something about the whale beached out in the open was kind of a little nicer than this lubed-up penis just in the middle of a warehouse where we shot. It was the most The Boys thing to start with that sequence.”
Brett Geddes, The Boys
Prime Video
The Boys is a satirical commentary on superhero culture, with many of the universe’s superheroes being warped versions of classic heroes we’ve seen on comic book pages and the big screen. Not only is Termite The Boys‘ answer to Ant-Man, but the inspiration for, excuse us, the explosive scene came from a viral meme that was circulated post-Avengers: Infinity War.
“Remember there’s that meme of Ant-Man going up Thanos’ butt and exploding Thanos? … Give the audience the thing that they want to see that Marvel can’t give them,” Kripke revealed. “Another writer, I forget who, said we’ve already done a butt explosion, which is an amazing, amazing point. Once you take butts off the table, there are really only so many orifices that he can go in to explode somebody.”
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If you are thinking about logistics and the fact that the prostate — Termite’s end goal in this sexual endeavor — is more efficiently reached by entering the rear, you’re not alone. Kripke confirms that the staff thought about it though and were not willing to repeat previous season moments.
“Butt stuff is something that we’ve already done and we are not going to repeat ourselves,” he stated. “We are artists and that would have just not been up to our standards.”
For more on the premiere three episodes of The Boys, check out our sister-site Metacritic‘s Q&A with Eric Kripke.
The first three seasons of The Boys Season 3 are now available on Prime Video, with new episodes released every Friday.
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