‘The Boys’ Cast Had A Whale Of A Time Reflecting On One Of The Show’s Craziest Moments Ahead Of Season 3

The Boys returns on June 3 for a third installment of satirical superhero mayhem. The show’s already previewed how Homelander is definitely not alright after the events of the Season 2 finale (watching his own son burn Stormfront to a crisp before Queen Maeve wished him a very lonely life). He ended up self-pleasuring from atop a skyscraper and probably killed some unsuspecting passersby in the process, or he made more Supe kids. This season has also teased Captain America parody Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), who will tear everyone’s little world apart, including his own.

What else There will be a musical episode (in which Frenchie and Kimiko get down in a seemingly wholesome way) and there will be the private-island-set “Herogasm” episode. From there, though, the season as a whole promises to be even more outrageous than what we’ve seen before. In other words, grosser than exploding heads and death-by-oral because the cast is teasing how The Whale scene was only the beginning.

You remember The Whale, right That’s the Season 2 moment that saw Billy Butcher drive a speedboat into the belly of an enormous sea mammal. Wee Hughie wore the greatest shock face in contemporary TV history, and even The Deep looked frightened. Amazon chose to use part of the scene while submitting for an Emmy, and let’s just say that the cast couldn’t stop talking about it to Entertainment Weekly. Here’s a taste of their obsession (from the mouths of Antony Starr, Karen Fukuhara, and Jack Quaid):

Every time Starr thinks showrunner Eric Kripke and his room of writers have gone too far with what they put on screen, it’s pretty much guaranteed that scene will become an iconic moment with viewers. He points to the season 2 episode where Urban’s Butcher drives a speedboat straight through a giant whale as a prime example. (The Emmys aired that clip as part of The Boys’ Best Drama nomination announcement during a July livestream. Quaid found it “most appropriate.”) And Fukuhara says season 3 “will make that whole whale sequence look like a piece of cake.” Reading the scripts, she didn’t know how they were going to pull off some of the material. “It’s not just about the crazy action scenes [or] the social commentary,” she explains, but also about “the depths of the characters, and the darkness that some of them go through. I don’t know how we did it, but hopefully it’s allowed to air.”

That wasn’t all. The scene is later referenced as the moment against which all The Boys‘ outrageousness is measured and the reason why everyone involved in the show trusts showrunner Eric Kripke’s vision. And it’s no wonder — can you imagine any other show or movie pulling off the same mood Nope, but it fit The Boys just right. The tone, the execution, and the long-game setup all worked marvelously, and now, the show’s prepping to refuse to hold back in holding the feet of “powerful white dudes” to the flames while roasting them for feeling “disenfranchised.”

Get ready, Compound V addicts. The Boys returns on June 3.