Gen V season 2 centers on a secret project dating back to the school’s founding in 1967, one that’s highly important to The Boys’ heroes and villains. Fazekas says there is also a connection to the upcoming prequel Vought Rising, which will follow two of the world’s first supes and the corporation that has monetized superpowers. Fazekas says the showrunners and writers talk regularly about their plans.
“[The Boys showrunner] Eric Kripke will say, ‘Oh hey, FYI, we’re doing this story,’ or ‘Can you address this?’ and sometimes we’ll have a storyline that Eric will be like, ‘Oh, I like this,” Fazekas says. “So it’s very fluid.”
Kripke provides feedback not just on Gen V’s plot, but on its humor. The Boys franchise is highly meta, combining references to real-world TV shows and movies with supe-driven versions, like a spin on Dog the Bounty Hunter who uses a heightened sense of smell to track his targets.
“What I’ve learned about Eric Kripke is, he loves a pop-culture reference that only three people know,” Fazekas says. “He thinks that’s the funniest thing. In the first season, we had a PaleyFest joke that he thought was so funny. I think the more niche a joke is, for him, that’s great. [So we’re] always trying things out — what’s going to be funny, what’s going to be weird, what’s going to not feel like how other shows do it.”
Gen V shares The Boys’ sensibilities when it comes to over-the-top violence and ridiculous scenarios. Season 2 kicks off with a group of people taking an experimental drug and dying in a variety of spectacular ways, like spontaneous combustion, their flesh melting off, and their organs falling out.
“It’s crazy. You certainly need the type of writer who can think that way, and we had ’em,” Fazekas says.
Beneath the gore, The Boys is a sharp satire of social media, corporate greed, and American politics, dealing with topics that have become increasingly relevant since the series premiered in 2019. College campuses have become a major front in the culture wars, and Gen V tackles those themes head-on. In season 2, the political ascension of the psychotic Superman equivalent Homelander (Antony Starr) and the revelation that Godolkin’s former dean was trying to kill all supes has turned most of the students against people without powers.
“You always want to take the real-world thing and think, How can we put that through the lens of our world? It’s not interesting to me to just replicate what’s happening in the news. How can we make it have meaning in our world?” Fazekas says. “[This season, we’re addressing] this whole identity-politics thing [where] there are good categories of people and there are bad categories, and whoever’s in charge gets to define who is good and who is bad.”
The plans for Gen V season 2 changed dramatically when star Chance Perdomo died in a motorcycle accident on the way to begin filming. The team quickly decided they wouldn’t recast him, and scrapped the five episodes they had already written. They penned a new season where Perdomo’s metal-controlling character, Andre Anderson, died while trying to escape the prison he and his friends were locked in at the end of season 1.
“We knew from the beginning that we wanted to honor Chance and honor Andre,” Fazekas says. “By the time we got to the end of the season, we looked back and we’re like, This whole season’s about him, which was somewhat intentional, and somewhat just organically happened. I’m really proud of it. Really, all of the thrust is about Andre in a great way, and all of the emotional moments that happened were about Andre.”
The first three episodes of Gen V season 2 premiere Sept. 17 on Prime Video. Future episodes will be released weekly on Wednesday.
