The Boys Showrunner Wants Fan-Favorite Character to Return
If there's one thing you need to know about The Boys, it's that the series stays close to the source material it draws from — even if those moments push the TV-MA rating as far as it can go. We're looking at you Herogasm. If Eric Kripke gets his way, he'll also bring back one of the comic's more popular characters.
That's right, the showrunner behind the series is hoping to bring back Jamie the Supe-Hamster.
"I would love to get this hamster back. Jamie is actually from the comics and so it was a bit of a cameo, an actually beloved character," Kripke said in a recent stop with TVLine. "And if I can figure out a way to get that hamster from Russia to the United States, I would love to have that character [back]."
Jamie appeared earlier on in the season when the eponymous group raided a Russian laboratory looking for Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). In the comics, Jamie's origins are much more R-rated involving yet another body cavity. Eventually, Hughie takes the animal home as a pet.
"He's actually fairly present in the books," Kripke said in a separate interview earlier this month. "He's a solid supporting character. So when we were breaking the story in the Russian lab [for the show] and there's a lot of creepy Compound V testing on Soldier Boy, [we thought,] what other testing would they have been doing?" He adds, "It started to make sense that there would be hamsters in there, and we all just at once said, 'Oh my God! It could be Jamie. We can finally bring in Jamie!'"
The writer told us earlier this year the streamer's never told him or his writer's room "no" on any content-related matters, meaning it was likely the writer's choice to not adapt Jamie's comic-accurate origin.
"Prime Video has literally never said no," the writer said at the time. " But that said, I think the writers do an incredible amount of self-policing, believe it or not."
"We really agonize over where's the line, because we never want to cross the line from outrageous into gratuitous or exploitive, or cheap or shocking for shocking sake," Kripke added. "There's an incredible amount of anxiety, and hand wringing, and guessing, and second-guessing about where it should be, because really I think what we've realized is no one is really going to tell us no, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. I found the more you can take those bananas moments, but ground them into character, and to the point where you can't tell the character story without it. Those tend to be our best ones, so we aspire to that."
The first six episodes of The Boys Season 3 are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes are scheduled for release every Friday.
What have you thought about the show's latest season so far? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter!