Inside that deranged Termite scene in The Boys season 3 premiere: 'We were literally blown away'
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Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Boys season 3 premiere.
Within the first 10 minutes of The Boys season 3, the crew managed to pull off something so insane, so shocking, so deranged, so... perfectly The Boys that they ended up topping all of their previous stunts in terms of the WTF factor.
We're talking, of course, about the Termite scene.
Showrunner Eric Kripke and stars Karen Fukuhara and Karl Urban walked through the creation of the sequence for Entertainment Weekly's On Set series, which goes behind the scenes of The Boys season 3 every week. That process included building an actual 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long prosthetic penis.
Amazon Prime Brett Geddes appears as the Ant-Man-esque Termite in one truly wild scene from 'The Boys' season 3 premiere.
The jaw-dropping moment begins with Kimiko (Fukuhara) and Frenchie (Tomer Capone) infiltrating a house party thrown by the Ant-Man-esque supe Termite (Brett Geddes), while Butcher (Urban) is surveilling the situation from a nearby van.
Termite is already going wild. He shrinks himself to have sex with a doll for the amusement of his party guests, but all the cocaine he's doing is making him sneeze. That isn't good when he goes to a back room with his lover (Bruce Langley).
"I want you inside me," Termite's man says as they snort more lines of coke. But it's not what viewers are thinking. Termite shrinks down so small that he's able to crawl inside his lover's penis to titillate him from the inside. As he makes his way towards the prostate, their hot-and-heavy moment turns into a bloody mess when Termite sneezes, causing him to shoot back up to normal size, exploding his partner from the inside.
According to Kripke, one of the show's writers and executive producers, Craig Rosenberg, the same guy who came up with the dolphin rescue sequence in season 1 and the speedboat-versus-whale moment of season 2, is the one to thank for thinking up the Termite opening. Kripke actually sees this as "a very natural evolution." Hear him out.
"Once you realize you're gonna do a tiny Ant-Man character, you have to have that Ant-Man run up someone's butt and then blow them up," he says. "But then we realized that we already had blown up someone's ass." That would be Translucent and his lost battle with the anal pipe bomb in season 1. "There's only so many orifices a person can go in. So really, by process of elimination, you [have to] run into a urethra."
Amazon Prime Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) faces off against the size-shrinking Termite (Brett Geddes) in 'The Boys' season 3.
Kripke was shocked by how few problems the executive overlords at Amazon had with this sequence. "They were cool with it," he promises. Though, they did have one standard the show couldn't cross.
"You're not supposed to show an erect penis," Kripke explains. "So we had to be very careful with the design of the penis — 'cause we built it practically. That's a real 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long penis built at great expense. But if you look at it, we had to design in all these wrinkles to make it clear that it wasn't erect. So, anyway, it's exhibit 7,023 why I love this job."
Fukuhara says she and Capone "were literally blown away by this sequence," which includes Kimiko and Frenchie rushing in during the aftermath and getting thrown around the room by a super-small Termite.
"They did such a wonderful job of making it hilarious, and also kind of tragic at the same time," she says. "When Termite sneezes and he explodes out of the guy, he has this look of horror on his face, and then Frenchie comes in and he's like, 'I didn't see anything.'"
"I stayed away from that set. I didn't feel like that was something I needed to see," Urban admits with a laugh. "After working on the show for two seasons going into a third season, you come to build up a certain desensitization to some of the more graphic content."
The first three episodes of The Boys season 3 are currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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