Amazon’s hit superhero series The Boys boasts some recognizable names among the ensemble, but the show still actively attempts to avoid stunt casting just for the sake of it. However, things could have turned out very differently had showrunner and executive producer Eric Kripke gotten his way.
One of the weirdest moments in a show full of them came in Season 2, when Chase Crawford’s The Deep got high on drugs and ended up having a conversation with his own gills. Comic book expert and all-round genre veteran Patton Oswalt was drafted in to voice the appendage, but during a recent panel at New York Comic-Con via CBR, Crawford revealed that Kripke originally had much grander designs in mind.
“I remember Kripke saying, ‘We’re going to try and get Helen Mirren for this. We want Helen Mirren to do these scales’.”
Dame Helen Mirren, Academy Award winner and icon of the stage and screen, was wanted to lend her vocal talents to the disembodied voice a drug-addled fallen hero’s gills that he converses with at the height of his trip. That sounds insane, but also right up the very unique street The Boys tends to walk.
Sadly, there’s no further information on whether Mirren declined the opportunity or wasn’t even made an offer, but it’s fascinating to imagine that someone who won an Oscar for playing the Queen was being eyed for a role that Kripke has described in previous interviews as “a mangina”.
