Yahoo Sports Shockingly Violent 'Boys' Season Finale Inspired By Donald Trump, Says Showrunner
An over-the-top violent scene in the Season 3 finale of the over-the-top Amazon series “The Boys” last week was inspired by former President Donald Trump, the series showrunner revealed.
The wild, creepy and horrifying superhero satire ended with a bloodbath that had witnesses in the storyline cheering.
In it, Antony Starr’s sociopathic right-wing Captain America, Homelander, introduces his superhero son to a rally of fans straight out of a “Make America Great Again” crowd. When a lone protester hurls something at his son that doesn’t harm him, Homelander lasers the guy’s head into explicit bloody bits — and the crowd cheers.
The inspiration? Trump, when he claimed during his first campaign that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
That quote was the “original inspiration for that scene,” showrunner Eric Kripke told Deadline last week. “Could we take Homelander so far as to literally kill somebody on Fifth Avenue and then be applauded for it?”
It’s “funny,” Kripke added. “It’s like at the time we wrote it, we felt it was like a little satirically pushed. But it is true that the more awful politicians are behaving, you know, the more popular they’re becoming with their fan base.”
So the scene may have been a bit gross, he conceded.
“I fully admit to it being a little less elegant and more urgent than what we’ve done in the past,” Kripke told Vulture. “But I would argue that society is a little less elegant and more urgent. Jan. 6 was happening while we were writing the season. We’re a product of the time when we write it. And Jan. 6 scared the shit out of me. It scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.
“People don’t love Trump in spite of his horrific behavior; they love him because of it,” Kripke saud. “He’s an antihero. The wilder he acts, the more he bullies people around him, the more they love him.”
But Trump wasn’t the only inspiration. Kripke also pointed to the trend of Republican politicians posing with guns and appearing to threaten their opponents in campaign ads, like former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. He’s currently running for Senate, and has run an ad encouraging “RINO hunting” — referring to centrist deprecated as “Republicans in name only” — while brandishing a shotgun.
“Hunting people and offering his followers to get a license to hunt those people,” Kripke emphasized in the Deadline interview. “Things are getting scarier and scarier, and people seem to be applauding it. That is definitely the point we’re making.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
