Ah, the sweet smell of success! Within the universe of Amazon’s The Boys, success probably smells a lot like burning flesh, whale guts, and a freshly popped can of Fresca. Thankfully the cast and crew of behind the success of The Boys don’t have catch a whiff of any of that to know that their show is a major hit in the real world. As the cast recalled during a visit to the set of The Boys Season 2 last fall, they could tell that the show was a hit just from the reviews and reactions of everyone around them. Everyone from random TV critics online to their friends and family had something to say about the show—and thankfully those early reviews were positive, because they woulda really harshed one cast member’s vibe.
“I try to stay away from reviews,” said Laz Alonso, sounding every bit as cautious as his character, Mother’s Milk. “I’ve gotten in my own head when I read reviews. Being able to read [reviews] at first, was the first thing that really gave me like—’Oh shit, we might be good.’”
The early reviews were good—which isn’t a given considering just how much superhero content there is to consume. There’s a lot of competition, so for The Boys to not only stand out in the crowd but stand out for the right reasons was a feat.
“I’ve been in movies that you put your whole heart and soul in and then people just kill it! Just annihilated!” said Alonso. “Even Avatar, in the beginning, they were calling us Smurfs. They were calling us all kinds of fucked up shit.” Not so, with The Boys! “When I started reading the [critics], the people that live and breathe this and cover everything and everybody, and they’re giving [The Boys] good reviews? I was like, alright! Maybe we’re onto something!… When it came out, man, it was just like, people really bought in. They bought in, and they loved the fact that we’re not the typical show. We’re something different.”
The show’s success with critics early on just validated what the cast felt while filming Season 1. “We know something special is happening,” said Tomer Capon, who plays Frenchie. “We felt that, even in Season 1. Now that we’re getting the feedback for it, it’s amazing.”
The cast then had to deal with, y’know, being on a hit show—which is a bit surreal considering that the superpowered half of The Boys is all about the pressures and danger of sudden fame. In a way, both Starlight and the actor who plays her, Erin Moriarty, endured a similar career trajectory. Of course, Moriarty’s rise to fame was way, way more positive anything Starlight went through when she joined the Seven.
“The environment on the show is a really supportive one, and it’s a really lovely one,” said Moriarty, whose superhero Starlight has no such comfort on the Seven. “We’re all a family off set. Luckily, it’s been a much more positive experience for me… For me, I’m just working on an awesome job with people I love. I’m much more fortunate than her.”
Jack Quaid—whose mild-mannered Hughie was designed to be the most relatable character on the show—knew they had a hit on their hands when he learned that the teens, the most reliable arbiters of cool, chimed in. “My little sister, she just went to boarding school—she’s like 13, and very much not allowed to watch this show,” said Quaid. “But she has friends that are coming up to her, I think they saw a photo of me on her phone or something, and they were like, ‘Oh, Hughie!’ And she was like, ‘You watch The Boys?’ Apparently, a lot of teenagers do—which they totally shouldn’t be! But that was the moment I was like, ‘Oh, teenagers are sneaking this show in. That’s something.’
Nathan Mitchell—who plays the Seven’s murderous man in black, Black Noir—has enjoyed the show’s rise from a unique vantage point. Since his face and voice have yet to be seen or heard on the show, he gets all the perks of being on a hit show and his day-to-day is more or less the same. “Only the people who are really into the show will know me. I still have this degree of privacy,” said Mitchell. But if you think that Boys fans haven’t figured out who’s under that cowl, then you don’t know Boys fans. “We got off at the airport for Comic-Con, and somebody walked up to me and was like, ‘Hey, can you sign this?’ It was me in the [Black Noir] suit. I was like, ‘Okay!’ That was before the show had even come out.”
When the show came out, the cast—specifically Karen Fukuhara, who plays the silent killer Kimiko—was surprised to find that Boys fans had been hiding in plain sight all along. “I think when a lot of my friends from Japan, and also America, reached out to me and they said, ‘I’m a comic book fan and I read this in high school,’ which is crazy, by the way, ‘and it was just translated so well on screen.’”
Thus a diehard fandom was born—and you better believe they started making fan art. “I was walking down the street, checking Instagram—which is a very unsafe thing to do—and somebody tagged me,” said Quaid. “It was this person who made fan art of The Boys as The Spice Girls. [Laughs] I was Baby Spice, because, of course. It was cool. You could tell that she put some thought into which Boy would be which Spice Girl. It was at that moment that I was like, okay. If people are making fan art, typically that’s a good sign.”
The Boys did more than inspire fan art; it inspired the fans themselves. There was somebody who came up to me at one of the conventions who said Hughie dealing with anxiety really helped her with her anxiety,” said Quaid. “We had this very real talk about—because I’m an anxious person, for sure—just talking to her about what that’s like and how it goes away, and how you deal with it. That got way deeper than I ever thought I would get with fans. That was really cool.”
The Boys are changing lives, one bloody brawl at a time.
New episodes of The Boys Season 2 hit Amazon Prime Video every Friday.
Stream The Boys on Prime Video
