Go (literally) inside the massive penis prosthetic that had an explosive debut in the Season 3 premiere.
[The below contains spoilers from “The Boys” Season 3, Episode 1.]
First, Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy” debuted a wise-talking animatronic penis. Then, HBO Max’s “Minx” showed us all the real thing — many, many times. Now, Prime Video’s “The Boys” is taking onscreen male nudity to another level — literally.
The reign of penis representation on TV continues thanks to the Season 3 premiere of “The Boys,” where Ant-Man-esque superhero Termite (Brett Geddes) shrinks down to enter his partner’s urethra and find his prostate as a sex act. Yet a coked-up Termite sneezes while inside his love interest and accidentally returns to normal size, splitting his lover in half from the inside, out.
“For those wondering…the dick is real,” actor Geddes captioned a behind-the-scenes Instagram pic of him and Termite stunt double Alex Armbruster posing in front of the giant 11-foot high and 30-feet long penis, covered in white powder.
“The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke previously confirmed that Season 3 will include the sex-fueled Herogasm storyline from the comic books by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, while also using three times the amount of blood for the third season.
Kripke also told Entertainment Weekly that the gigantic penis prop was a no-brainer for the explosive sequence.
“Once you realize you’re gonna do a tiny Ant-Man character, you have to have that Ant-Man run up someone’s butt and then blow them up,” Kripke said. “But then we realized that we already had blown up someone’s ass [in Season 1]. There’s only so many orifices a person can go in. So really, by process of elimination, you [have to] run into a urethra.”
And Amazon had no problem with the Prime Video show taking the…leap. “They were cool with it,” Kripke added. “You’re not supposed to show an erect penis. So we had to be very careful with the design of the penis — ’cause we built it practically. That’s a real 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long penis built at great expense. But if you look at it, we had to design in all these wrinkles to make it clear that it wasn’t erect. So, anyway, it’s exhibit 7,023 why I love this job.”
“The Boys” VFX Supervisor Stephan Fleet told IndieWire that the show will always opt for practical effects when possible.
“In this day and age, there’s a tendency to lean on visual effects very heavily because it’s quicker in production, but we don’t do that,” Fleet said in 2021. “We go the other way on this show. We always start with the most practical way we can do it.”
Fleet continued, “You try to find that grain of reality in everything, and that can be very hard to do. You could have a sentence that’s like, ‘We want the Boys to crash into this whale, but it needs to look as real as possible’ — or, ‘We want this giant dick monster to wrap around Mother’s Milk’s neck, but it has to feel real.”
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