[WARNING: spoilers for The Boys season 3 premiere to follow]
The Boys season three has already been totally unhinged, and there have only been three episodes so far. First, there was an A-list cameo within the first few minutes of the season. Next….well, it involves an Ant-Man tribute.
In an extremely bonkers moment from the first episodes, a superhero aptly named Termite, played by Brett Geddes, ends up shrinking himself down small enough to enter his partner’s penis. And then the unthinkable happens: Termite sneezes and blows up while inside his partner. Hey, it happens.
The show is no stranger to weird moments and giant explosions. Showrunner Eric Kripke said that this was a nod to the Ant-Man of it all. “Once you realize you’re gonna do a tiny Ant-Man character, you have to have that Ant-Man run up someone’s butt and then blow them up,” Kripke told Entertainment Weekly. “But then we realized that we already had blown up someone’s ass.” Which they did in season one. “There’s only so many orifices a person can go in. So really, by process of elimination, you [have to] run into a urethra.” You just have to.
Surprisingly, Amazon was on board, as well as the practical effects involving a 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long prosthetic penis.
“They were cool with it,” Kripke began, adding that there was a speed bump: “You’re not supposed to show an erect penis,” Kripke explains. “So we had to be very careful with the design of the penis — ’cause we built it practically. That’s a real 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long penis built at great expense. But if you look at it, we had to design in all these wrinkles to make it clear that it wasn’t erect. So, anyway, it’s exhibit 7,023 why I love this job.” A real, practical penis! That’s Hollywood for you.
Kripke then told Variety that Craig Rosenberg, who wrote the script, was the main mastermind behind the idea, which was inspired by those Ant-Man memes. “These evolve in a writers’ room and the evolution of that sequence started with, ‘We need The Boys to fight a superhero.’ So then we ask, ‘What big superhero haven’t we done yet?’ Someone says, ‘We haven’t done Ant-Man.’ And then someone else says, ‘There’s that meme of Ant-Man climbing up Thanos’ butt and blowing him up. So we should do that. We should give the audience the thing that Marvel can’t give to them.’” Marvel definitely will not give you a practical penis, no matter how much Deadpool wants to.
(Via Variety and Entertainment Weekly)