Here’s a little treat for your Thursday: a practical penis stunt.
In the third season of The Boys, which aired this past summer, we witnessed something unlike anything ever seen on television before: Herogasm. Heroagasm is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like: a big Supe get-together/orgy where they have sex and do weird Supe sex stuff. The Boys never hesitates to push the limit, and thusly, Herogasm included a penis that was on fire. According to The Boys series creator and showrunner Eric Kripke, that penis was a practical effect meaning that, yes, The Boys set a penis on fire, literally. The things we do for art!
During a For Your Consideration conversation moderated by Metacritic, Kripke described the special effect used in the sixth episode of season three, titled, if you can believe it, “Herogasm.”
“That’s practical; that guy did that for real,” Kripke said. “The gel is so good in terms of how it doesn’t burn you that it was a stuntman, and I was like, ‘Really? Are you sure that he’s going to do that?’ And our stunt coordinator John Koyama, who’s also amazing, said, ‘Oh yeah, no, it’s going to be fine.’ So he got one of his stunt guys to rub all of that fire gel all over his junk and lit it — take after take after take. I couldn’t get over it.”
But the fiery penis was not the only crazy thing at Herogasm. Kripke explained that they wanted every frame to contain something, and the writers took inspiration from existing superheroes: for example, in the episode, a woman is using a lasso like Wonder Woman, but for bondage, since this is an orgy. “We had to pack the frame so that everywhere you looked, you could freeze frame and see 10 insane things,” Kripke said. Call Kripke Ethan Hunt because the seemingly impossible mission of Herogasm was accomplished, and no penises were burnt in the process.
(Via Metacritic)
