"Fascism that cloaks itself in patriotism": "The Boys" boss on dangers of strongmen and superheroes

Eric Kripke is accustomed to the real world aligning with the version he writes, where men and women fly. So of course the first trailer for James Gunn’s “Superman” dropped on the day I spoke with the man behind “The Boys." Why wouldn't it?

Gunn’s vision of America’s greatest comic book hero is wrapped in optimism. Homelander, played by Antony Starr, is the Man of Steel’s gaudy, cruel inverse, an all-American apple with radioactive razor blades baked into the filling. The regular guys standing against him — and for actual truth, justice and the ideal of the American way — are a grubby band held together by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Marvin Milk (Laz Alonso).

"The Boys" began as a best-selling comic by “Preacher" co-creators Darick Robertson and Garth Ennis; Kripke's adaptation uses the comic's Übermensch to show us how omnipotent men would actually behave, inspired by Donald Trump and the far right's oligarchic power structure propping him up. 

Homelander is also a product — an enhanced being created in a lab run by Vought International, a multimillion dollar "global leader in the media, retail, energy and pharmaceutical sectors," according to the show's lore. Over the course of decades the conglomerate seeped into every sector of American life to the degree that it might as well own the populace. Since Homelander installed himself as the company's head, he's functionally the king of the world. He views himself as a god.

Thus, the Season 4 parallels between Homelander’s coup and the inability of the namesake non-powered heroes to stop it turn out to be frighteningly prescient.

Its premiere dropped two weeks after Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a New York jury in his hush-money trial. That episode shows Homelander being acquitted of murder despite having lasered a man's head off in front of a crowd.  

Its finale, originally titled “Assassination Run,” debuted days after Trump survived an assassination attempt. It was filmed in 2023. 

The Boys (Prime Video)Prior episodes show this universe's version of Laura Ingraham, Firecracker (Valorie Curry), revealed the medical records of progressive superhero Annie January (Erin Moriarty) showing that she had an abortion, and her fiancé and teammate-Hughie (played by Jack Quaid) stumbling on a plan to build prisons for dissidents. Elsewhere families watch children's programming that teaches kids to report on their parents' supposedly un-American behavior. 

By then Kripke already knew the upcoming fifth season of “The Boys” would be its last. What he and millions of others didn't predict is that a few months after the fourth season finale, America would reelect the man who promised to be a dictator on Day 1 and enact vengeance on his enemies. Just like Homelander does in "Season Four Finale."

A writers’ room rule to which Kripke hews closely is that what’s bad for the world is good for the show. But the similarities between what played out in Season 4 of “The Boys” and our version of current events is beyond unsettling. And the show doesn't intend to let up: Kripke admits the last season is grim.

“It's the natural end of a character like Homelander. If you give him truly unfettered power with all his insecurities and traumas, this is a version of what he would do,” he told Salon in a recent chat conducted over Zoom. “But so goes many fascists who are weak and thin-skinned and ultimately driven by ego, despite how much they front as heroes.”

Soon a new year and a new reality will be upon us. Rewatching “The Boys” may be bitter medicine, but it might also help brace us for what’s coming. Under a leader intent on shaping the media to his will, speculative fiction may be one of the last bastions of political and social critique. And if you're wondering how Season 4 matched current events so accurately, in our wide-ranging conversation Kripke confirms the writers consulted manual for government takeover.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

One of the things that people have been talking about lately is looking ahead, and what the next four years mean for people making art in all kinds of mediums, and certainly in TV. There have been reports of movies and TV shows scrubbing plans for certain characters, for example. As someone who writes in the speculative space, what does that indicate to you about what is possible for stories like “The Boys” moving forward? It’s based on a property, but you've taken it in a direction that doubles as social critique.

The obligation I feel is to double down. I'm certainly not going to back off any of it. You know, we have a final season. We have our own sort of worst-case scenario speculation of a fascism that cloaks itself in patriotism. And there's obviously historical precedent for that. We've been building toward it for a while, and we're going to tell our story.

I mean, we've been occasionally and coincidentally prescient about some events. Season 5 is pretty bad, so I'm really hopeful that we are not prescient about some of these events. I would love to be accused of being an alarmist. That would be great. 

This is something that I wanted to ask while Season 4 was running. If I recall, you first conceptualized the story two years before it came out.

Yeah.

Did you look at any of Project 2025? That also came out in 2022 — were you aware of it? Did that inform anything in the writers' room?

If I remember correctly, about mid-writing, like right in the middle of the process, we found it. Funny enough, we found it because one of the main architects, his last name is Vought. (This refers to Russell Vought, Trump's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget.) So we found it through someone saying to us, “Have you heard of this guy, Vought? And we're like, ‘What? That's too on the nose. No way.” So we started going down the rabbit hole and got to Project 2025 pretty soon after that.

Yeah, we discussed it in the room, and we said, “You know, this is a pretty accurate depiction of what Homelander would want.” A saying we have in the room is, “Bad for the world, good for the show.” And this was definitely one of those examples where it's like, here we have a really concrete example of what a Homelander world might look like that feels very grounded and terrifyingly real. Because it is.

Again, I'd rather have the alternative. I'd rather it be purely speculative and fictional. But we're using what we see around us.

Speculative fiction is a great way to explore difficult topics. But for people who kind of want to say, “Well, this could never happen . . .”  take “The Handmaid's Tale.” Margaret Atwood has said it's based on real events that have happened in societies around the world. Given that, what do you think about the utility of the speculative space in terms of both conveying hard messages, but also its potential to grant a bit of false security to the audience?

It feels like there are two questions there. One is, look — the thing I love most about genre and why I really only want to be in this space, is because you can say subversive things about the world that you just can't get away with in a straight drama. It would either be too earnest, it would either be too boring, too wonky . . . But there's something about the fantasy and the action and the fight scenes – there are lots of spoonfuls of sugar all around it that we get to have as an advantage when we're telling the story.

You can watch a takedown of late-stage capitalism and the risk of democracies falling into fascism and be entertained and laughing as you're doing it. It's difficult to do that in a straight drama.

Now, in terms of the false sense of security, I can't control how people view that stuff. When I watch it, I see the subtext of it, and I see [that] someone is making a point and warning us that something like that is possible.

I think there's something actually healthy about a little bit of distance between the viewer and the subject, where they can look a bit of a different world that maybe they'll see things that they're not noticing if they're just watching the news. They'll just have a perspective that gets them a little more clarity. But anyone who is reading or watching any good science fiction and saying, “Oh, this is just fantasy." They're not looking at it closely. Anything good – and I mean any, name it: “Star Trek,” “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” “The X Files,” anything — it's all talking about the world that we're currently living in, and at least for me, that is what is so appealing.

The Boys (Prime Video)There’s this idea that somehow grim times produce good art. That's been disproven a few times, but I wonder what you think about the ways the current political climate is going to impact making art like this show.

You know, the realization that the majority of the country — a slim majority — but the majority just sees the nation differently than I thought they did . . . I think there are a lot of people who feel like I feel. And I think that especially when you're in the position of being a decision maker, that can't help but have a cooling effect on shows like ours, where we're sort of proudly wearing our perspective on our sleeve and are blunt, to say the least, in terms of how we go after it.

So if you're a corporation, I would imagine you can't help but say, “Well, if I'm trying to appeal to an audience, we got a pretty loud wake-up call that the audience doesn't necessarily agree with some of the politics in this particular show.” It's probably just riding the currents of commerce.

But on the other hand, anyone who can push this kind of story through and make a lot of people feel a little less alone, it’s worth doing. Again, not to belabor a point, but you can sneak a lot of stuff into genre. There's a reason that some of the best stuff by way smarter writers than me — I'm not beginning to compare myself to them but look at, like, Arthur Miller making “The Crucible” in the McCarthy era. What's great about what we do is there are subversive ways that you can get your message across even in times that aren't necessarily friendly to that message.

I think there’s a connection between “The Boys” and “Supernatural,” which you had created. I like to consider what different shows say about the American story, and I actually spoke to [“Supernatural” co-star Misha Collins] a little bit about this at a Comic-Con a long time ago. He pointed out that the show’s overall theme isn't necessarily the vision of good and evil that the post-World War II version of the American story is deeply hooked into, that it’s mainly about American masculinity. I would love your perspective on whether there's any kind of continuum there, in terms of what keeps drawing you to these stories and what they might say overall about how America sees itself.

I mean, look, we're all products of our experiences and our upbringing and the media we consumed. I'm a sucker for [Steven] Spielberg, [George] Lucas, you know — “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Star Wars,” the million subpar copies that are so deeply in my brain. Those were always the stories I gravitated towards.

But as I got older and a little more experienced as a writer, I learned quickly that character psychology is really everything, at least for me. It's how I make sense of the stories. And when you start breaking down the psychology of the traditional masculine hero, like for real — when you are like, “OK, what makes that person like that?” – you quickly reach the conclusion that they are so f**ked-up, so wounded and so broken. It's just natural. You just wouldn't run into that burning building and be making those quips and . . . diving off a skyscraper like John McClane. You’re just not doing that if you're not, like, a deeply f**ked-up person. And that became really interesting to me.

During “Supernatural” —  probably a little more Dean than Sam, because Sam was always meant to be like a regular guy. But Dean, the notion was like, “OK, but if you were Han Solo for real, like, how f***ed up are you to end up in that position, making those choices?” Then we started playing that, and Jensen [Ackles] was really good at it. And that became really interesting to me.

Then when we got into “The Boys” . . . one, it's baked into the source material. But two, “The Boys,” at least our version of it, is not just subversive about politics or superheroes. I think it's intentionally critical and a little subversive of the structure of the genre itself, in that violence is a . . . psychotic way to go about solving a problem.

A movie we reference as much as we reference any other movie in the writers' room is “Unforgiven."  We talk a lot about how Eastwood so brilliantly took the conventions of a Western to point out how damaged the cowboys and gunfighters in that Western would be — how corrosive revenge and vengeance and all the things that are the bread and butter of superhero movies and westerns and action movies, how corrosive and toxic all that stuff really is. So anyway, you're right. It's been an ongoing interest of mine.

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One truism that the superhero genre sells is that in the end, everything's going to be OK because goodness and justice prevail. As you were figuring out how “The Boys” is going to end, did any part of that idea come into mind?  And is there even an obligation to think that way?

I've evolved my perspective I think, as I've matured a little bit through this process. Had you asked me that question a few years ago, I'd have said, and have said in interviews, “Look, superheroes can be dangerous because they teach you that there is some strong man who is going to swoop in and save the day. And there's a short line between that and a real-world strong man.”

But I've changed my perspective on that a little bit because having spent years really starting to study the format, the conclusion I've reached is this: In the real world, superheroes are the worst possible idea. There are people, strongmen, who front as having superhero-like abilities to solve complicated problems and to fix everyone's problems and, “Just rely on me, and I'm the one who's going to fix it for you.” And that's very, very dangerous, and has been dangerous since the beginning of civilization, and remains dangerous today.

What I realized, though, is that when somebody watches say, “Superman,” they are not using Jimmy Olsen as their avatar. They're using Superman. They emotionally put their eggs in Superman's basket. That's how they're emotionally experiencing that world. People see themselves as the heroes, and yes, the wish fulfillment of the power. But also, there is something valuable in a kid watching that and having that kid emotionally connect to goodness. Giving someone a little moral direction and something to aspire to I don't think is a bad thing, as long as the people realize that what might be good for them, personally and emotionally, could be really bad for the world if brought into the real world.

The Boys (Prime Video)

That kind of explains, too, why there might be this tendency to connect more to Homelander for some people than Billy Butcher, right?

That is exactly right. I mean, I don't understand the people who really sympathize with or emotionally connect with [him]. Part of it is Antony does such a remarkable job in that role, and he makes you understand where he's coming from. And the other part of it is, I'm just not very good at writing villains. Like, I need to understand why they're doing what they're doing, and let the audience know that there are reasons behind it, as hateful as they may be. And I think that weirdly makes some people sympathetic towards Homelander. But he is not anyone you should aspire to.

I disagree with you saying that you're not good at writing villains. Those exact reasons you gave make him a more interesting character.

Well, thank you. But I'm not good at writing, like, “I'm evil and I'm going to wake up and do evil today.”  l don't understand that psychology. That's just crazy, and crazy is the most boring thing for me to write. What I really get is a character who wakes up, looks themselves in the mirror and says, “I'm going to save the world today. I'm going to do a lot of things that I know are right,” and then they proceed to do the most hateful, horrible, destructive things, but they think they're right. Locking down that psychology is, to me, part of the fun of writing a good bad guy.

Season 1-4 of "The Boys" are available to stream on Prime Video. Season 5 is currently in production.