Showrunner Eric Kripke warns, “Walking through ‘Herogasm’ is a dangerous and sticky endeavor.”
Warning: This article contains spoilers fromThe Boysseason 3, episode 6, “Herogasm.”
Executive producerEric Kripkehas been thinking about “Herogasm” ever since he started work onThe BoysTV series forAmazon.
Starlight (Erin Moriarty) and MM (Laz Alonso) infiltrate Herogasm in ‘The Boys’ season 3.Prime Video
“I don’t like to back down from a challenge,” Kripke tells EW.
“It’s really how I made all my creative choices.”
The problem was, it felt too bananas as a concept, as least at the beginning.
The Deep (Chace Crawford) gets in on the fun of Herogasm in ‘The Boys’ season 3.Prime Video
In actuality, they were heading to a remote island to kick off a weeklong orgy.
The comic panels did not hold back on theveryexplicit nature of the super-powered sexcapades that went down.
“There was no way we could have sold that pitch the first season,” Kripke says.
Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) blows the roof off of Herogasm in ‘The Boys’ season 3.Prime Video
“They were like, ‘We knew that this was gonna happen sooner or later.
You should just go do it.'”
Kripke and director Dan Trachtenberg had already put on a scaled-down version of “Herogasm” in season 1.
“I was always like, ‘It’s too small.
It’s not crazy enough,'” Kripke says of that sequence.
“It’s perfect for a pilot, but we can go bigger.”
Shooting “Herogasm” was another beast entirely.
“It’s a lot in terms of producing and management.”
The cast picked up on the vibe.
Ackles remembers the crew looking like they had seen ghosts when he came to shoot the Solider Boy-Homelander confrontation.
“They looked like what they had seen they [couldn’t] unseen.
They even said that,” the actor says.
I’ll never forget that.
“Chace Crawfordrecalls his arrival on set and seeing everyone chain-smoking, looking “rattled.”
“So literally every 10 minutes you would hear someone just yell ‘oh s—!’
That happened to Erin Moriarty, the star behind Starlight.
It just was filled with so many goodies,” Moriarty remembers of that incident.
“I was walking around and touching all of these dildos and I go to use some hand sanitizer.
I pressed the pump and the entire crew went, ‘No!
That just symbolizes so, so much.”
By day 2, “they’re all naked mole rats and you just want to get outside.”
Yes, that was Herogasm.
On getting to that scene in the scripts, Crawford says, “I was like, ‘Perfect.
[Been] looking forward to it all my career.’
I was really excited.”
“There was definitely a conversation to verify like, how are we going to do this?
What’s the logistics?
Is it going to be moving?”
Turns out, Ambrosia was going to be moving.
Crawford describes it like a necklace: “You put this harness around.
[It’s] kind of heavy.
Erin had not seen any of it.
I had done the special effects test and everything, but the actual shoot was pretty quick.
Dealing with the moving octopus was a lot.
It was a first, that’s for sure.”
Moriarty got used to the environment pretty fast, despite her run-in with a bottle of lube.
She became desensitized to the nudity deeper into the shoot, which she never thought would happen.
It doesn’t matter anymore.’
But it was also so hilarious that I would even become desensitized to something like that.”
“But it can’t happen in this show, unfortunately, for reasons everyone understands.”
“We talked about it,” he says of the writer’s room.
“It just didn’t track.
It conflicted with a lot of the other things we were trying to do with Soldier Boy.”
Here’s hoping for moreDiabolical!
WatchEW’sOn Setin the video above to learn more about howThe Boysseason 3, episode 6 came together.
