Jeffrey Dean Morgan's “The Boys” season 4 character explained

Here's the comic book role the "Supernatural" and "Walking Dead" star stepped into.

Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Boys season 4, episode 1, "Department of Dirty Tricks."

The team behind The Boys kept Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s role in season 4 under wraps... for the most part. Online leakers successfully pinpointed the character months prior, if you knew where to look. However, now that the premiere episodes are out in the world, we can talk about the elephant (monkey?) in the room.

The Supernatural alum makes his debut in the first episode as Joe Kessler, a character pulled from The Boys comics. While Butcher (Karl Urban) is waiting outside Mallory’s (Laila Robins) office at the Bureau of Supe Affairs, he’s approached by this old chum.

Related: Eric Kripke on why season 5 will be the end of The Boys

"He is an old colleague of Butcher's," showrunner Eric Kripke previously told Entertainment Weekly. “I can tell you that he shares a lot of Butcher's concern and hatred of superheroes. It really came from the notion of everyone else in The Boys is always trying to pull Butcher back. So what would happen if he started working with someone who wants to push him forward?"

Kessler is a relatively small but important character in the comics. He works as a CIA analyst, but more importantly, he's one of Butcher’s primary sources of intel on supes. Kessler was branded with the nickname Monkey, after two green monkeys… well... did stuff to both of his ears while visiting a brothel. (It’s The Boys! We’ve seen worse.)

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On the show, it's apparently been 11 years since Kessler and Butcher have seen each other — and we can see why the two bonded the way they did. "Karl is a better looking, better acting version of me, but we're the same f---ing motherf---er," Morgan previously told EW. "To work with that is so much fun."

Related: How The Boys season 4 finally recruited super fan Jeffrey Dean Morgan

The Boys season 4 dropped the first three episodes on Thursday and will now release one episode a week. Sides have formed around Homelander (Antony Starr) and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) as the supe problem takes a MAGA-inspired turn. Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the smartest person in the world and the newest member of the Seven, is slowly plotting a coup that would put congresswoman and veep candidate Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) in the president's chair, as well as make supes the law of the land.

Season 4 has now been confirmed to be the penultimate season as the show prepares for its close with the upcoming season 5. "No one can watch this season without feeling at the end like 'It's ending next year right?'" Kripke said. "So we might as well announce it so people can watch it with that cool, epic, heading-toward-the-end feeling, which is what I'm hoping for."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.