By: Izumi Hasegawa June 17, 2022
Prime Video has been pushing the envelope, especially in The Boys. Where will they take us in the new season? Karl Urban (plays Billy Butcher) and creator, Erip Kripke, enjoy the wild ride themselves too.
Q: For Karl, how was exploring a more broken and deranged side of your character, Billy Butcher?
Karl Urban: I won’t lie, it was definitely a huge challenge. There was so much going on for Butcher this season, mentally, physically, and the scenes with Ryan (played by Cameron Crovetti) were both tender and sweet and they brought out some compassion in Butcher that we hadn’t quite seen before. And then also ultimately the tragedy of that relationship. That was a challenge to play, and it was difficult to play. I just feel that this season’s probably been my most challenging yet, and I really enjoy getting to explore the superpowers. We’ve had this conversation with Eric for a couple of seasons now, going “come on, there’s only so much we can play the blackmail card, we have to level the playing field” and, in true Eric fashion, and with the writers, Butcher does get to level the playing field, but it comes at a cost, a high personal cost in terms of pain and ramifications for everyone around. So, it really is that sort of moral dilemma: are you willing to turn yourself into a demon in order to defeat a demon, and if you do, what is the cost? And every character has to make that choice this season.
Q: There’s a lot of crazy stuff that’s happening this season (season 3), like other seasons. But without too many spoilers, what are you most excited for audiences to see this season?
Eric Kripke: Despite the fact that there’s all that crazy in the show, obviously, and it’s certainly completely bananas, honestly, I’m most excited for people to see how these characters develop. They all go through like such a ringer this year and the stakes are so high, and it’s so much more intense. That, to me, is the stuff that I think ultimately keeps people coming back. I mean the shocking stuff is great and crazy and water cooler moments, but I learned a long time ago that when you’re in TV, you’re in the character business. And it’s my job to addict you to these characters. And if I can, the show will work. And if I can’t, the show won’t. Everyone, all the actors, the whole cast, Karl (Karl Urban plays Billy Butcher) and the entire cast, they so bring their A game. Every season, but especially this season and just watching how much they throw themselves into their roles is something I’ll never take for granted.
Karl Urban: I’m most looking forward to an audience seeing which side of the fence the characters will fall upon. Every character has a choice to make, whether they’re going to join the fight and which side they’re going to fight on. The wonderful thing about this season is that it puts characters together who haven’t worked together before, so you get sort of interesting, fresh, dynamisms occurring, and just sort of diving deeper into these characters and into the heart of it. I’m super excited, for instance, to see that.
Q: For Eric, there’s a musical number in this season. How long did it take to get that whole thing together? Did you have to edit anything out or something that just didn’t work with that musical number?
Eric Kripke: You’d be surprised by how dark the voice is, but I love Hollywood musicals! It’s a genre that I completely love. I was dying to get a musical number into the show. We actually tried in season two in the script stage, and it was going to be a number for Karen (Karen Fukuhara, plays Kimiko Miyashiro), but we never could pull it together and it wasn’t right to the story, and it sort of fell away. So I’ve always had my eyes on doing it, and this season, we sort of found the perfect story opportunity to do it. But then you actually have to pull it off, right? It has to go off like clockwork, and it’s the composer who needs to write exactly the right length of this, it’s a classic Hollywood song, that has to edit it to exactly the right length. And then, our choreographer, Amy (Amy Wright, choreographer), who is just brilliant, then had to get Karen and Tomer (Tomer Capone, plays Frenchie) like weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of choreography, plus all the background dancers, plus that’s really Karen singing. Not live, but we recorded it, and that’s really her. She does all of her own singing this year. And so you have to bring all of these elements together, then you have to shoot it, and you have to shoot it like a classic Hollywood musical with cranes and overhead shots and Nelson, our director, did such a fabulous job with that. So you have to bring all of that together and make it work. ASo after we worked that hard on all of those elements, like there was no way I was cutting it down because like, we busted so much ass to pull that off. I love it. It just puts such a smile on your face. I love that for as dark, as cynical as the show can be, there’s these relationships and little beating hearts in the show that are so pure, and I think Frenchie and Kimiko are one of those relationships.
The Boys season 3 is on Prime Video.