[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for The Boys‘ season-five premiere.]
Jessie T. Usher kept the secret of his The Boys‘ departure from his castmates for a whole year, which was no easy task, he tells The A.V. Club. It wasn’t until they started reaching out after reading the scripts that he revealed the truth. The actor has always been a prominent part of Prime Video’s gnarly superhero satire, but was told well in advance by series creator Eric Kripke that his character wouldn’t survive the final season’s bleak premiere, although the death wouldn’t be in vain. At least speedster Reggie Franklin, a.k.a. A-Train, goes out as a hero instead of the narcissistic villain he started as in what Usher believes is a poetic arc for a TV show that enjoys killing characters off in grotesque ways. “My response to Eric was that I was glad they cared enough about A-Train to give him this momentous send-off, where he finally has a moment of resolution, and he can stare down the monster and tell him he’s not as scary as he thinks he is.”
By monster, Usher obviously means Antony Starr’s tyrannical Homelander, who frequently tormented A-Train when they worked together as part of Vought’s superhero team, The Seven, although A-Train eventually grew tired of all the bullying and evil machinations. In season four, his well-deserved redemption arc turned him from Homelander’s ally to foe. Their rivalry comes to a head in “Fifteen Inches Of Sheer Dynamite,” when he drops in at the last minute to save The Boys from Homelander’s wrath during a prison escape, despite telling Starlight (Erin Moriarty) he wouldn’t step up to help. By the end of the hour, Homelander takes revenge by snapping A-Train’s neck, but not before A-Train gets to call his old pal out as, among other things, a “pathetic loser.”
Starr tells us that he’s a huge fan of how this closing scene is written and constructed because “it’s a great moment of weakness for my character, even though it doesn’t seem that way, and a great moment of strength for Jessie’s character.” And in a move completely unlike Homelander and A-Train, the actors take a quick second to gush to each other about how much they’ll miss their working dynamic:
