“Gen V” showrunner breaks down the Cate reveal and muppet massacre
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Warning: This article contains spoilers from Gen V season 1, episode 5, "Welcome to the Monster Club."
The fourth episode of The Boys spinoff Gen V left us with some loose ends. Having helped subdue a panicked Sam (Asa Germann) with her classmates, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) was in the middle of a sentence when the entire screen cut to black. When the blood-bending supe woke up, she was lying naked in a bed with the female form of Jordan Li (London Thor) cozying up into her shoulder — equally naked.
All signs seemed to point to Rufus (Alexander Calvert), the walking, talking psychic roofie, as the culprit. He and Marie have bad blood since she used her powers to blow up his dick when he tried to rape her. Cate Dunlap (Maddie Phillips) also divulged that she was sexually assaulted by Rufus in the past. Plus, he was spotted mingling with Dean Shetty (Shelley Conn). It seemed cut and dry.
And yet, it wasn't Rufus. Sam revealed that Cate, on the insistence of Shetty, had previously been using her powers to make her late boyfriend Luke (Patrick Schwarzenegger) forget that he even had a brother, and now she's doing it again with the friend group.
Gen V showrunner Michele Fazekas speaks with EW about the character and the twist, as well as another big moment from the fifth episode, "Welcome to the Monster Club": Sam's hallucinatory puppet fight sequence.
Brooke Palmer/Prime Video Maddie Phillips stars as Cate Dunlap on 'Gen V'
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Each of the characters are really emblematic of specific issues that college kids can face: Marie represents cutting and self-harm, Emma [Lizze Broadway] represents body image, Jordan Li [London Thor/Derek Luh] represents gender identity, and so on. Was there a specific thing that you wanted Cate's character to represent in the context of this show?
MICHELE FAZEKAS: Cate is really interesting. When I came onto the show, there was already a pilot script. I was like, "Oh! Cate's the most powerful of all of them." It's very hidden because she just seems like Golden Boy's girlfriend, or she's just pretty. But when you actually think about what she can do, she has exponentially more power than anyone. The drugs that you see her taking, that is in part what controls it. Part of it's just her own personality. You'll find out a little bit of her backstory in subsequent episodes. There's always a cost to [the powers]. For her, you'll find out what it's like to be able to hear everyone's thoughts. What does that do to you? If you rein that in, are you reining everything? It's a really complicated power and it plays into some of Marie's story. In episode 3, she talks to Marie about, 'Do not blame yourself for what you have done in your past. Our parents shot us up with a chemical when we were babies.' She has a lot of repressed rage about that. And let's just say it's going to come out.
I would also love to know everything anyone could possibly ever want to know about this muppet massacre sequence. To start, where did the idea come from? Was this a writers' room brainstorm?
Yeah. I can't remember what came first, the Jason Ritter scene or the puppet scene. But Jason Ritter was always the pitch for the Jason Ritter scene because we worked with him on an ABC show called Kevin (Probably) Saves World, and he can do anything and is such a delightful person. It comes out of story and character. We wanted to show the stress on Sam and grappling with a mental illness story, so you have to have the underpinnings of real drama and real stakes to build the outrageous off of it. Then really weirdly, when we started talking about it with production, our head of makeup department goes, "I could do that. I've built puppets before." So, he built all the puppets. I have one of the guards. I think people were a little nervous about, is this going to look good? Is this going to be stupid? We're not going to shoot it like muppets. We're going to shoot it and cut it like an actual fight sequence. The only difference is it's puppets, but then having the sparkles and silly string instead of blood. That was one of the more amazing things that any of us have been involved with.
Are there different rules when you're dealing with muppets in terms of what you can get away with showing on screen?
Yeah, because you're not seeing real blood and real gore. This is my first foray into streaming, so obviously the rules are different than in broadcast. I think in The Boys and our show, the violence is so over the top. What I call "comic book violence" almost allows you to get away with more rather than a real, visceral thing. The scene where Sam punches the guard and his fist comes out of his mouth, that's very gory, but it's also so big that there's something about that. I had worked on Law & Order: SVU for five years. Stuff that we just talked about on that show I feel like is much more traumatic than some of the gore you see on this show.
Brooke Palmer/Prime Video Asa Germann as Sam on 'Gen V'
How did you actually shoot it? Was this a much smaller stage than your live-action ones?
We realized you cannot shoot this on a location. You actually have to build that set. We had puppeteers come in and help us with the prep for that. The puppeteers were often in a green-screen sock so that they were erased out of the scene [in postproduction], and the sticks on the arms. You rely on the subject matter experts who are puppeteers and they tell you what they need.
What are the actual challenges of shooting with muppets and what are the benefits?
The challenges are just the physical logistics. I think you have to really be very exacting about, what are your shots and what is your framing? It takes a longer amount of time. Also for the actors, they're acting against a puppeteer. They can see everything. It didn't feel impossible. Then once you get into editing any fight sequence, you assemble it and then it just shrinks. What you actually see is a tiny fraction of what was actually shot.
I love how you took something so inherently comical but took it so seriously.
From the outset, we were like, "You do not need to add a joke here." The joke is that it's puppets, and that's the only joke. Everything else is real. I think if you start adding on hilarious bits within a puppet sequence, it's already too much. Everyone understood the assignment. This is a real serious fight sequence. You shoot it that way, you treat it that way, you perform it that way.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
New episodes of Gen V drop Fridays on Prime Video.
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