Rules The Cast Of The Boys Couldn't Break

Amazon's "The Boys" is one of the funniest, raunchiest, and most successful superhero properties of all time. Fans have become obsessed with the show's biting satire and wildly inventive — and often painfully brutal — action scenes. "The Boys" owes a lot to showrunner Eric Kripke, who oversaw some of the biggest changes from the original comic series, but the show wouldn't be what it is without its incredibly dedicated cast.

When we rewatched "The Boys" we noticed some new details, though what really stands out when you make your way back through the series is just how far the actors are willing to go. Being part of a massively popular series already comes with some serious restrictions on an actor's time and professional life, but "The Boys" really puts its cast through the wringer. Whether they're being asked to cover themselves in fake whale guts or face their own mortality to shoot a practical stunt, the cast constantly double down on their commitment to the show.

The cast as a whole follow a set of rules laid out by Amazon, Kripke, and the very story they're helping to create. The end result of all that rule following is a show that perfectly captures the absolute chaos of a world filled with unhinged super-beings, and for that, we thank them. Here are all the rules the actors have to abide by when making "The Boys," which will end with its upcoming fifth and final season.

"The Boys" doesn't waste any time in letting the audience know just how gruesome and gory it's going to be. Within the first few minutes of the premiere, Hughie is covered from head to toe in the blood and guts of his girlfriend, Robin. That's far from the only time that someone unceremoniously explodes on screen, and even episodes that don't feature a particularly violent death are filled with scenes that were seriously gross to film.

At any given moment, the cast of "The Boys" have to be ready to get their hands dirty, literally. Most of the time Hughie ends up being the messiest person in any given scene. "I've become something of an expert on getting fake gore on me, which is something I never thought would be part of my life, but it definitely is now," Jack Quaid joked in an Amazon interview. When Quaid made that comment, he'd only filmed the first season of the show, and things have only gotten even messier since then, to say the least.

"The Boys" has seen characters get covered in organs, super vomit, and on one memorable occasion, semen. "It was just soap, lube, water, all stuff that wouldn't irritate the eyes or skin. They swore no DNA," Laz Alonso (who plays Mother's Milk, aka M.M.) told GameSpot about the time he filmed an unfortunate encounter between M.M. and a supe called Love Sausage (Derek Johns). According to Alonso, as gross as the scene was, it was still more pleasant than filming the famous whale scene in Season 2, which many fans felt went too far.

The titular Boys frequently find themselves in terrifying situations. An average day for any member of the team usually includes at least one deadly face off, but the characters in the show aren't the only ones who have to face their fears. Filming the show has put the actors in some scary situations, and no one's been more terrified than Jack Quaid was during a particular scene for "The Boys" Season 2.

Speaking with Entertainment Tonight, Karl Urban shared the story of how he scared Quaid without even realizing it. They were filming a speedboat scene where Hughie, M.M., and Butcher are escaping from The Deep, and Urban was driving the boat himself. Quaid was nervous about the shoot and had a safe word for the boat ride. Unfortunately, the safe word was "Karl," and Urban couldn't hear it over the sound of the engine and the nearby helicopter filming them anyway.

"I remember at the end of one run looking over at Laz and he was fine, then looking over at Jack and he is white as a sheet," Urban said, adding, "and I thought he was just seasick or something, but no, he's actually in mortal fear of his very life." The next time you sit down to rewatch "The Boys," you'll be able to tell that the fear you see on Hughie's face in this scene is 100% genuine.

You can't really have a superhero without a super suit, and that holds true in the universe of "The Boys." The suit each hero wears is a large part of their identity, as well as Vought's marketing strategy. Plenty of supes seem to wear their costumes with pride, but for the actors playing the characters, the suits are a bit of an unwelcome obligation.

Many of the super suits in "The Boys" are on the elaborate side, so taking them off can be a serious struggle. That leads to some unique challenges when the actors are on set for long days of filming. "I've peed on [my costume] more than once," Erin Moriarty (Starlight) told The Mary Sue. "It's an obstacle course to get on and off." She wasn't the only person who found her costume difficult to remove and uncomfortable to wear — Aya Cash, who joined the cast as Stormfront in Season 2, also faced toilet issues. "It took about halfway through the season before someone mentioned to me, one of our super suits gals in wardrobe was like, 'You know, maybe we can put a zipper in so that you can take down the pants so that you can pee by yourself,'" Cash told The Mary Sue. "I couldn't pee by myself for most of the season."

It wasn't just the women on the cast that didn't get along with their supe costumes. When it comes to costume struggles on the set of "The Boys," Antony Starr arguably has it the worst: His Homelander costume was created using a body scan, so it's as skin-tight as can be. "Because the suit is so tight — there's no way you can fit a marble in there — I have to maintain the same kind of fitness throughout filming," Starr wrote in Men's Journal. The suit, unsurprisingly, gets incredibly hot, and Starr has to carry a battery-powered cooler with him to keep from overheating.

The cast of "The Boys" has to follow rules coming from all sorts of different people, like costume designers, episode directors, and showrunner Eric Kripke, but there's one entity that has the final say on just about everything the cast does: Amazon Studios. Clearly the powers that be are completely fine with "The Boys" pushing boundaries, but there have been a few times where bosses have stepped in with some restrictions.

Kripke told Entertainment Weekly that in Season 1, he imagined a scene showing "an ice man having sex with a woman doggy-style when she's wearing a fur coat. Ultimately, he had to cut the idea before filming because they couldn't fit it in the budget. The ending of "The Boys" Season 2 actually contains a scene that was previously nixed by Amazon: Homelander masturbating on top of the Empire State building was supposed to happen in Season 1, but Amazon pushed back and said no. Apparently somewhere between the two seasons the company decided to soften its stance.

"The Boys" Season 3 features one of the raunchiest scenes in the entire series. The scene where Termite (Brett Geddes) shrinks down to walk inside his boyfriend's penis was fully greenlit by Amazon, except for one restriction. "You're not supposed to show an erect penis," Kripke told Entertainment Weekly. As such, they had to go out of their way to make sure that when Geddes walked onto the practically-created penis set, everything followed Amazon's rules.

"The Boys" is no stranger to nudity or sex scenes, and characters have been baring it all since the very first season. While the show's managed to mine the secret and kinky lives of supes for plenty of laughs, there's at least one person hoping that Season 5 tones things down a bit. "Oh, man, I kind of just want nudity to stop," said Jack Quaid on the Happy Sad Confused 10th Anniversary podcast (via People). "My butt's had a lot of screen time and it's not a great one, you know what I mean."

Quaid always seems to be the cast member who gets called on to strip down or get sprayed with fake blood, but at least he got to slowly ease into the process. When he joined the show for Season 3, Jenson Ackles had an extremely revealing first day on set. Since Ackles' character Soldier Boy had been in a containment pod for decades, he didn't exactly have a pair of shorts handy when the Boys showed up to free him. Soldier Boy's nudity in the scene made sense for the story, but it did mean that Ackles was completely naked while shooting with many of his new coworkers for the very first time.

Starring in "The Boys" means being open to some wild ideas. Cast members often have to do things they rather wouldn't, but sometimes that works out for the best. In a particularly memorable scene from Season 3, Homelander forces The Deep to eat an octopus that he knows. Behind the scenes, Chace Crawford was eating syrup-filled mochi over and over again while filming. Crawford said the scene briefly ruined pancakes for him, but the end product turned out to be incredibly impactful. PETA even gave "The Boys" an award for not using an actual animal in the scene.

Crawford's not the only one who had to suffer through an unpleasant edible experience for the show. When Hughie and Butcher start messing around with Temp-V, they discover that the side effects are short-term superpowers followed by a stream of bright green vomit. Jack Quaid posted a shot of the special vomit on Instagram and told fans, "I promise it tastes a lot less disgusting than it looks." In this instance, Hughie actually didn't get the worst deal in the cast, which must have made for a nice change for Quaid.

"The Boys" cast members have to follow rules that apply to their characters, their training routines, and even their diet, but that's not where the rules stop. According to Jack Quaid, being part of "The Boys" really does feel like being part of a family, and he says that's largely because of a rule that Eric Kripke has whenever he's looking for new cast members to join the show. "Basically, he has a 'no a**holes' policy when it comes to casting," Quaid told Bleeding Cool. "You know, every single person in that cast is just incredible as a performer and also just as a person."

The cast of "The Boys" seems like they have fun spending time together because they really do. Their chemistry comes through on screen, and it's easily visible whenever you watch cast members do interviews together. That familial attitude is as much about getting along as it is about learning to tolerate each other's flaws. "The Boys" cast has confirmed that Antony Starr's on-set behavior is impeccable — when he actually arrives. In interviews, Starr's castmates have ribbed him for consistently being late to set. Being part of a family means being able to take a bit of teasing, and Starr has taken the comments in stride.

Actors bring a piece of themselves into pretty much every role they play, but some cast members from "The Boys" have really contributed to the way their characters are portrayed on screen. In an interview with Awards Radar, Karen Fukuhara explained how showrunner Eric Kripke makes it a habit to incorporate details about the actors into the show in unconventional ways. "I think that's why Erin was singing in Season 2," Fukuhara said. "A funny one is Black Noir, Nathan [Mitchell] — Eric found out that Nathan had a nut allergy on our way to San Diego Comic Con one year. And he was like, 'That's brilliant. We'll put that in.'" For her part, Fukuhara had a background in martial arts that led to Kimiko getting a few more fight scenes and Fukuhara doing many of her own stunts.

Sometimes the influence works the other way around. While watching Season 4 of "The Boys," many fans noticed that Laz Alonso's character looked significantly different than he did in Season 3. Alonso told Men's Health he'd been considering a lifestyle change, and that he decided to time his life to his character's big transition. He said: "I wanted to, in [M.M.'s] OCD fashion, to depict that and show that visibly. I went into an extreme calorie reduction. I shaved because now he reports directly to the White House." M.M.'s character arc gave Alonso the push, but it's the actor's transformation that really sells the story in the show.

In an age of CGI, "The Boys" stands out for how much it leans on practical effects, and that extends to the epic fight scenes. Mastering the choreography takes a ton of work, but no cast member has to work harder on this front than Karen Fukuhara. Her character has some of the most involved fight scenes in the series, and there's one that stands out to her in particular: Season 4's dildo fight.

"To be honest, it's all fun and games and it's hilarious, but rehearsing that took a lot of time," Fukuhara told Variety. She was able to rely on her past martial arts training to a degree, but it still took work. "The two dildos resembled kali sticks, which is a form of martial arts. There's a whole sequence to these moves, and I had never done them before."

For all the effort that goes into Fukuhara's fight scenes, her dance scene from Season 3 might actually be her most memorable moment on the show. To get that right, Fukuhara and costar Tomer Capone had to learn to dance and memorize some professional-level choreography. Whether it's a musical number or an airborne punching match, the practice the actors put into their moves comes through in the final product.

Every actor wants great roles, great coworkers, and job security. Unfortunately, "The Boys" can only offer two of those three things. There's one last rule that cast members have to follow: They have to be willing to die at a moment's notice. "I begged them to tell me where we're going," Susan Heyward said about her experience of playing Sister Sage in "The Boys" Season 4. Heyward said that the actors get the scripts one at a time, so they don't know what's happening next. That definitely helps reduce the potential for spoilers leaking, but it also means that cast members find out their character dies just before its time to film their final scenes.

"It's actually really funny, because from the moment I joined this show, I knew that she was going to die — not because I knew for sure, but I knew what show I was coming on to," Claudia Doumit, who played Victoria Neuman, told Variety. Even knowing her character was likely to die, Doumit couldn't predict when it would happen, and the show's writers were more than happy to let her wait it out in the dark. It's not ideal for an actor, but following this rule is worth it to be a part of such a beloved show.