The Boys season 2 introduces the wildest supe yet from the comics
Panagiotis Pantazidis/Amazon Studios
Warning: Spoilers from The Boys season 2, episode 6 are discussed in this article.
There's not much that showrunner Eric Kripke can't show on The Boys. Season 1 featured an entire superhero nightclub orgy sequence and a separate scene where a supe crushes a man's skull between her legs during... you know. There was even a reality where Kripke said he wanted to feature “an ice man having sex with a woman doggy-style when she’s wearing a fur coat." It was cut, not because it was too raunchy for Amazon Prime Video, but because it was "logistically too difficult to mount on our budget." So, it shouldn't be too brow-raising when season 2 introduced someone by the name of Love Sausage.
Born Vasilii Vorishikin, Love Sausage is a name directly lifted from the always-NSFW comics by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson. He's also one of those fan-favorite characters like Terror. A Russian communist ex-cop, he has the power of a superhuman... well, his name is Love Sausage. You can put two and two together.
In the context of the show, Love Sausage comes by way of actor Andrew Jackson, who's had small roles on Criminal Minds, Reign, and Dark Matter. He's one of many patients at the Sage Grove Center, which Stormfront (Aya Cash) and Lamplighter (X-Men star Shawn Ashmore making his debut) have been using to experiment with Compound V so that they can turn it into a drug for instant superpowers. When the surviving patients break out, thanks to some interference from Frenchie (Tomer Capon), Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), Love Sausage gets the opportunity to show off his... skill.
"Love Sausage came around reasonably late in the development of the script," Kripke tells EW. "We had a couple of the drafts written, but then we sometimes reach a point, as we did in this one, where we said, 'You know what? It's just not crazy enough. We're missing that moment that makes people say holy sh—.'"
The solution arrived like a perverted aha moment. The character was already on the minds of the writers, given his popularity from the comics. "We just haven't been able to get to [him] because literally he's a giant Russian man with a huge dick — that's his story — and that they are really tight in his super suit tights," Kripke explains. "The name is ridiculous and it's all so ridiculous. Every so often Garth Ennis crosses over into something so absurd that it just wouldn't fit in the reality of the show."
Then the writers decided they needed one of the Sage Grove patients "to do something insane." And it clicked. "Love Sausage! Love Sausage could be one of the patients!" Kripke remembers. "And then his penis can be his power!"
In one of those moments that makes Kripke appreciate this crazy job that he has, he says they shot the Love Sausage scenes with a combination of practical effects and CG. In other words, yes, they made "an actual 10-foot animatronic dick puppet like a tentacle in an old '50s movie" and then put in computer effects for the rest, Kripke confirms. "We're in these long meetings where these craftsmen and experts are asking me about the amount of veins. 'How many veins should it have?' We spent 20 minutes on should it be circumcised. We arrived at, no, it should not be but I get paid to have these conversations."
Mother's Milk is the one who suffers an attack by Love Sausage when his CG manhood is wrapped around his neck. Alonso did not see this one coming.
"So, the whole penis around the neck thing," he begins. "I read the first script. Usually when the scripts come out, I’ll just read the first version and then I’ll put it away because I like to be super, hyper focused on the episode we’re working on now. They usually give us the script for the next episode midway through the episode we’re working on. So, it can be a distraction if you focus on that. I read it just to know where my character is going and then I discard it."
In the version he read, he was expecting MM to see Love Sausage over the security cameras and drop a remark laced with puns. "There is no penis around the neck!" Alonso emphasizes. "So, we always tease each other, and always on set playing the dozens and cracking jokes. And one day in the makeup trailer, Karl [Urban] is like, 'You ready for that penis that’s going around your neck?' And I’m like, 'Ain’t no way in the world there is a penis being wrapped around my neck.'"
Jack Quaid and Capon backed up Urban, but Alonso thought it was a practical joke. "So, I finally get back to my trailer," he continues. "I let my curiosity get the best of me and when I see that [in the new script], I'm like, ‘Oh my God. Karl is definitely behind this.' I am almost positive to this day he just pitched that idea to Kripke and Kripke with his sick sense of humor was like, 'It’s great! Let’s do it!'"
Kripke, for the record, says it wasn't a prank. "But it was really funny," he adds.
Related content:
