Homelander-Firecracker Breastfeeding, Tek Knight Sex Dungeon

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Episode 6 of Season 4 of “The Boys,” currently streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video.

This week on “The Boys”: Homelander (Antony Starr), Sage (Susan Heyward) and Vice President-elect Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) rally a number of Federalist Society One Percenters to align with their plan for total supremacist domination and to create internment camps for any opponents – and somehow that wasn’t the craziest part of the episode.

First, there was the huge reveal that Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character CIA agent Joe Kessler has been a hallucination of Butcher’s (Karl Urban) this whole time. You can read more about that here.

Second, Hughie (Jack Quaid) goes undercover as the supe Webweaver at the ultra-elite alt-right party hosted by billionaire supe Tek Knight (Derek Wilson) to discuss Homelander’s plan – and ends up becoming Tek Knight and Ashley’s plaything (Colby Minifie). in Tek Knight’s sex dungeon, pretending he’s completely fine and coping with it all, just after the death of his father Hugh Sr. (Simon Pegg).

“It was one of the most challenging and one of my favorite things I’ve had the opportunity to do in this crazy world of a show,” Minifie said. Variety. “A lot of preparation went into this. There were about four fittings for that balloon of an outfit designed by Michael Brown, and I loved being in that. But I loved how the writers and Kripke found this new door for Ashley to explore – how she let go of her stress and how all the crap flowed down. She receives all this stuff from Homelander, then uses it in a new way and runs with it.

Third, Firecracker (Valorie Curry) proves her undying loyalty to Homelander by revealing that she is taking prescription drugs that cause her to breastfeed (and enlarge her heart), giving Homelander the opportunity actually to breastfeed from her. That makes Homelander, the mother-problem-addled leader of the Seven, very happy.

“I love how that scene played out so well because we both came to it with this utmost vulnerability and full of sincerity — which just makes it so much stranger,” Curry said. “But with Firecracker, despite her madness and the things she spews, she has an uncanny ability to know what people need, whether it’s in a crowd or one on one. And even Homelander can see the human inside that shell, and she can see what that human needs, even if on the outside it looks like a bizarre fetish. And she wants to give him that too, because she isn’t afraid of him – she should be. But she really believes her vision of who he is, so she feels like she has no reason to fear him, thus making herself vulnerable to his vulnerability. It’s so intimate.”

Curry said a significant amount of preparation went into that scene by “The Boys” costume department, “just to build the architecture that makes it possible” to depict Firecracker breastfeeding Homelander, adding, ” The supersuit team should just patent the whole situation there. ”

See below for Variety‘s Q&A with ‘The Boys’ showrunner Eric Kripke who dives deeper into Firecracker’s breastfeeding scene, Tek Knight’s sex dungeon and Hughie’s torturous time spent as Webweaver.

Let’s start with the Tek Knight sex dungeon part. Where did the idea for this come from? And why put Hughie in this situation now – kick him when he’s in trouble, by having him sexually abused by his childhood hero after his father had just died?

Well, that’s a dark way to look at it! We think it’s hilarious. Obviously, Tek Knight is our version of Batman, and we really wanted to play with that trope: Batman’s fascist underpinnings as a really rich guy who preys on poor people and then profits from the incarceration. So that was one. Tek Knight was already set up as a freak, so we were already about halfway through. Then the idea came up: he should have a Batcave – but let’s be honest, the Batcave would be a sex dungeon. Even the real Batcave is just this side of a sex dungeon. It is very dark and there are rubber suits everywhere. It’s not too much of a stretch to add a few dildos and then a weird urinal that turns into a face mask.

And in the comics, there’s a great storyline where Hughie goes undercover, disguised as a superhero. That was a story that Jack had always asked us to do. So part of it is that you always have to be careful about what you ask the writers. Then we finally had this Webweaver character and the idea of ​​Spider-Man going down to get tickled in the Batcave is just too good to pass up. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t leave that on the table.

Were there parts of that scene, in writing or when you started filming, that Amazon said, “No, that’s too far”?

No, that was all pretty much the way the script was written. We had our poor writing assistant come up with a long list of real kinks because we were looking for them. And I remember reading the list and thinking, “What is pie farts?” And then they explained it to me, and it’s real – but don’t look for it. I just said: that’s incredible, we have to do that.

And then it seemed like it was a very natural connection to include Ashley, because she has dom/sub tendencies. I love that it’s such a perfect setup that he doesn’t know his own safe word. It’s like a wonderful comedic setup that he’s trying to find all the time.

Would the safe word always be ‘Zendaya’ – with the hint that Tek Knight says this is what Webweaver “loves most” — as a nod to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man? Or have you worked out other possible safe word ideas??

No, it was Anslem Richardson, the brilliant writer of the episode – he just put that in the first draft. I don’t think we ever talked about it, and he just threw in that his safe word was “Zendaya,” and I laughed my ass off about that.

It’s what Spider-Man loves most!

Yes! It’s what Spider-Man loves most.

After going through all of this, Hughie finally breaks down in tears with Annie at the end of the episode once they get back to headquarters. Will we see more consequences of that in the final episodes? Because he’s been through a lot with the death of his father, and then that trauma happened in the sex dungeon.

His story in this particular episode is the kind of denial and compartmentalization that many of us have when dealing with the death of a loved one. And if you watch the whole episode, he always just says, “It’s going well, it’s going well, it’s going completely well.” I’m doing fine.” That’s what a lot of people do before you can finally open the door to the pain that you’re feeling. And I think that’s part of healing. So I think he’ll keep going and really try to absorb and learning what his father and mother taught him about forgiveness, and really trying to carry that into the season because he really has the most mature and human arc of all the characters this season.

Where did the idea for Firecracker breastfeeding Homelander come from? We know his milk fetish, we know his mommy fetish. But the choice to actually take it to this level on screen and put Antony Starr and Valorie Curry at ease with it…

No, of course Ant and Val said, “Let’s do it!” I think I remember telling Val on Day 1 when I saw her in Toronto, “Just to be clear, Firecracker is going to breastfeed him.” And I think her response was something like, “Well, of course it is.” When you look at that character and see how slavishly devoted she is to Homelander, and how she would do anything for him – as she made it abundantly clear by saying it to him seven times in a row – to give him the thing he desires most in the future the world makes sense, in a bananas way.

As we said in the audience, because she’s also trying to get into a better position to sell out Sage, they’re now competing for Homelander’s attention. So the conversation in the room turned to Sage being good at what people need intellectually, but Firecracker is really great at what people need emotionally. And we said, “Well, what does Homelander need most in the world that no one else can give them?” And it’s a hop, skip and a jump to, “Well, he would need a woman willing to breastfeed him.” And I distinctly remember Ellie Monahan in the room saying, “If we do that, that’s the craziest thing we’ve ever done.” And it’s close, man.

That scene, first of all, where the milk is squirted in his face, and Ant’s shock and utter delight is such a beautiful moment. But any other sane show would fall away at that point. And besides, not very wise – but if you disappear, you know what will happen.

The fact that we cut to the actual breastfeeding scene makes me cover my mouth every time. It’s just so beautiful, and wow. Exactly what it means for the characters: the actors’ balls to pull that off. I mean, it’s just my boss’s kiss to all of them.

And the drug that does that only expands her heart slightly!

Just a tiny bit.

This interview has been edited and condensed.