(Warning: This post contains spoilers for “The Boys” Season 2 Episodes 1-3.)
If you’ve seen the first three episodes of the second season of Amazon’s “The Boys” — and if you haven’t yet, why are you here? — then you know exactly what scene this story is about. But just in case you somehow don’t get the pun in the headline, we’ll remind you.
We’re referring to the bit in Episode 3 where Butcher (Karl Urban) smashes a motorboat filled with Hughie (Jack Quaid), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capon), Kimiko and her brother Kenji (Abraham Lim) into a freakin’ whale. (You can watch part of the scene here.)
So how did they pull that off? Well, first “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke assures TheWrap that, obviously, no whales were harmed in the making of that bonkers scene. Well, no real whales were.
“Some of the shots, the big high shots, are CGI,” Kripke said. “But the production designer and the visual effects people decided we needed to build the whale practically. So we built a 50-foot long, 11-foot high whale. And the boat was on a ramp and could ram into it, and all this blood could come out. And you could shoot inside the whale and it was all anatomically accurate. And so that’s just mind-blowing to me that that huge thing was really there. You know, the guys are covered in this blood, which is pretty much just corn syrup. So there’s flies and bees, because they are all attracted to the sugar. So they’re covered in sugar, they’re standing in basically a giant sugar cave and there are bees and insects everywhere and it’s hot. So at least their discomfort was accurate of what you’re seeing.”
“It’s one of the craziest moments I’ve ever done as a producer and I’m so proud of it,” he continued. “The first half is helicopter shots of this boat, which Karl Urban is actually driving fast, because he’s a New Zealander, so he’s really comfortable with watercraft. And I think the rest of the actors on the boat were horrified that we were letting him drive. So when he’s hopping waves, all those screams from Jack Quaid are legit. And then they smash into the whale.”
A new episode of “The Boys” Season 2 will launch next Friday, Sept. 11, on Amazon Prime Video.