Chace Crawford's Gills Scene From 'The Boys' Might Be The Strangest TV Moment Of 2020

Photo credit: Amazon
Photo credit: Amazon

From Esquire

Amazon Prime's The Boys knows its way around a bizarre moment – this is a show that solved the problem of how to kill a man who has diamond-hard skin by putting an explosive in his rear end and blowing him up from the inside out. But one moment from Season Two, Episode Two stands out as one of the weirdest scenes the show's ever pulled off yet – and we talked to star Chace Crawford about it.

Season Two finds Crawford's character, disgraced aquatic superhero The Deep, still fired from the Seven and banished to Ohio after sexually assaulting his former co-worker, Starlight. He's linked up with a religious group called the Church of the Collective Destinations, and they set him up on a journey of self discovery with the help of some hallucinogenic tea. While he's tripping, The Deep is finally able to confront the part of himself that's at the root of his his destructive behaviour and deep self-loathing: His gills.

In the scene, The Deep hallucinates that his gills have come to life, and speak to him with the familiar voice of comic Patton Oswalt. "You imagine women will laugh at us, so you humiliate them first," the gills point out. "You can't swim from us forever." After having a heart-to-heart, The Deep and his gills duet acappella to Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful." It's all very, very strange.

Crawford was first given a heads up that the scene was in store by showrunner Eric Kripke and executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg at a press event. "We're kind of waiting to go on for some panel, and Seth was like, 'Oh man, Kripke, did you tell him about the new scene?'" Crawford told Esquire. "'He's like, 'Oh, it's going to be good.'"

When it was time to shoot the sequence, Crawford was most worried about his singing. "I knew it would be bad and I knew it would be weird," he says, "but I wanted to be emotional and weird."

Patton Oswalt wasn't on set to provide live vocals, so the show's creator brought in a professional musical theatre actor to duet with Crawford. "In between takes I'm like, 'Can you get me on tune?'

"That was probably the funniest part," he added, "singing it with this amazing actor, but singing this weird song."

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