During these recent years of superhero dominance on television and at the box office, The Boys has offered up a viscerally different alternative to Marvel and DC’s more heroic characters. As Colby Minifie (the show’s long-suffering assistant-turned-HBIC Ashley) tells Consequence, she enjoys how Prime Video’s extremely dark comedy offers a “totally diabolical, messed-up version of the superhero world.”
That said, many members of the team still have a lot of fondness for the properties their show satirizes, including creator Eric Kripke: The executive producer says he watches “all superhero things — not just as research, which is part of it, but I enjoy them. I’ve seen every single Marvel movie. I’ve seen every DC movie. I like them as a fan. There are ones I like and ones that I don’t like as much, but I watch them all.”
Amongst the cast, Claudia Doumit, who plays the head-popping politician Victoria, says she grew up loving the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films, while Karen Fukuhara, who’s played Kimiko since Season 1, also chimes in to mention Batman and X-Men.
Fukuhara additionally got a lot of exposure to the Marvel universe thanks to an ex who was “super-into” the franchise, and she says that “I can see why people get so into it — it’s special, it builds a community. I meet a ton of fans that are a fan of our show, that are a fan of all of the other DC and Marvel movies as well. And it feels good to be a part of a community like that, for sure.”
Many cast members see a lot of nuance in the genre: Veteran Erin Moriarty says that “Deadpool, Thor: Ragnarok, those were the ones I always loved — those were the ones that made fun of themselves a little bit.” Because even before auditioning for The Boys, she says she had “superhero fatigue,” to the point where when she first learned about the opportunity to play Starlight, she texted a friend to say the role “sounds so cheesy.” Then, she actually read the script, “and I was like, perfect. And it’s just elevated my prediction of what it would be since then.”
This isn’t Moriarty’s first time as a series regular on a superhero show, though she’s quick to mention that Marvel’s Jessica Jones (in which she played the titular character’s best friend, who eventually gets powers of her own) was a “female-driven and edgy and anti-hero oriented plot. So, to be very clear, I loved being on that show. There’s an antiquated formula that involved the man and the ingenue that we’d already started to transcend prior to The Boys — we don’t have to be making fun of the genre to achieve that. I love Marvel forever for that experience.”
