The Boys: First Look at Laurie Holden’s Crimson Countess Revealed

The upcoming third season of The Boys is set to debut The Walking Dead veteran Laurie Holden in the role of Crimson Countess, and today, Holden took to social media to debut the first image of herself in costume. She will join the cast of the fan-favorite series alongside Supernatural‘s Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy, making two new stars incoming with serious geek-TV cred already under their belts. Ackles’ character is a goof on Marvel’s Captain America, and in fact both Soldier Boy and Crimson Countess is a riff on Scarlett Witch. Both of them appear in the comics on a team making fun of The Avengers in The Boys miniseries Payback. 

Obviously, timing could hardly be better to do a send-up of Wanda Maximoff, with WandaVision one of the most talked-about TV shows of the year. To make the Crimson Countess / Scarlet Witch comparisons even more obvious, the character has a red costume and a romantic relationship with “Mind Droid,” a la Wanda’s relationship with the Vision. In the comics, like so many other heroes, Crimson Countess finds herself in the crosshairs of Billy Butcher after a slight.

You can see the image below.

While the series doesn’t follow the comics slavishly, showrunner Eric Kripke works with Garth Ennis, who wrote the comics, and Darick Robertson, who drew them, as executive producers.

“I’ve sent him every script to this day,” Kripke told told Consequence of Sound of his relationship with Ennis back in 2020. “I even just sent him episode three of Season 3 yesterday because, to this day, he wants to weigh in on Butcher’s dialogue. And I’m happy to have him do it because he knows Butcher’s dialogue better than I do, and he knows British slang way better than me, so I’m happy to have him pitch suggestions. He says Butcher is his favorite character that he’s created, so he’s very protective of him. But he’s pretty open to the rest of it. He gets it. He gets that it’s inherently a different medium.”

Both seasons of The Boys are now streaming on Amazon Prime. It’s unclear when the third season will premiere but a 2022 debut seems likely. Amazon is also doubling down on The Boys as a franchise for the streamer, ordering the previously announced spinoff show to series