‘The Boys’ Showrunner Breaks Down Those Surprise Season 4 Cameos

Spoiler alert: The following story contains spoilers for “The Boys” Season 4, Episodes 1-3.

“The Boys” has always managed to bring in A-list actors for quick cameos, but the series outdid itself in Season 4 when they convinced Will Ferrell and Tilda Swinton to join.

Ferrell shows up in the second episode and plays a heightened version of himself who’s starring in a movie with A-Train (Jessie T. Usher). Much to A-Train’s annoyance, the film they’re making is a clear send-up of “The Blind Side,” with Ferrell playing the coach.

Showrunner Eric Kripke told TheWrap that they went straight to the actors to sign them on because “agents don’t get as fired up to be surrounded by so much depravity.”

“Like a lot of our huge cameos, it’s usually people we can reach out to,” Kripke said. “What Jess Chou, the writer, wrote in the script was, I think, like ‘Huge Hollywood Star steps out of the car.’ At the time I had just had a meeting with Will, we were talking about a script that never really materialized, and just like chatting a little. So I reached out to him and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing this part?’ To my absolute delight, he was.”

Kripke added that when the day of Ferrell’s shoot arrived, the weather conditions couldn’t have been worse.

“It was a brutal shoot,” he said. “It was like freezing rain sideways all day and he’s outside in it all day. He could not have been lovelier or kinder or more patient as we were dragging him through weather hell.”

When it came to finding the voice for Ambrosius the octopus, Chace Crawford told TheWrap that Kripke wanted an “Oscar-winning British actress.” Crawford stars on “The Boys” as The Deep and said he didn’t learn he was technically acting opposite Tilda Swinton until much later.

“No, I had no idea,” he said. “Kripke always said he wanted to get the most Oscar-winning British actor around and there are only like four of them in the world. He texted me like, ‘Don’t tell anyone but you’re going to get a kick out of this.'”

The offer to Swinton went out through reps rather than via personal connections, and Kripke was a bit surprised when she said yes. For him, the day she spent recording “the dumbest possible s—” was a career highlight.

“Unlike a lot of our other cameos, we didn’t know Tilda,” Kripke said. “We just sent the script to her rep. She came back saying it was hilarious and she wanted to do it to our – I don’t what to say, shock, but it was a surprise. She came in for one day to record all the episodes and I was there. I have to say, watching the classiest possible actress record the dumbest possible s— was one of the great days of my career.”

“The Boys” Season 4 airs new episodes Thursdays on Prime Video. Episodes 1-3 are available now.

The post ‘The Boys’ Showrunner Breaks Down Those Surprise Season 4 Cameos appeared first on TheWrap.