The Boys Showrunner Shares The One Herogasm Scene Prime Video Almost Made Them Cut

The Boys really pushed the standards of TV with its Season 3 episode “Herogasm”, which featured nothing less than a free-for-all superhero orgy, which horrifically became the scene of mass murder. The Boys warned viewers well in advance that “Herogasm” wasn’t going to be for the faint of heart – and they weren’t lying. In fact, one of the biggest questions that viewers have always asked (especially after “Herogasm”) is how The Boys even gets away with half of what it does. Well, as it turns out, “Herogasm” pushed Prime Video closer to the edge than we thought… 

(WARNING: The Boys Season 3 SPOILERS Follow!) 

While you would’ve assumed Prime Video’s execs would’ve balked at all the superheroes going at it buck-naked (and in some truly twisted ways, literally and figuratively), it was actually the one supe making dirty love to an animal that caused a big stir! As the superhero orgy sequence in “Herogasm” goes down, Starlight (Erin Moriarty) stumbles upon her teammate The Deep (Chace Crawford) in a back room, getting oral sex from an octopus. Needless to say, Starlight (and the audience) are horrified and grossed out – and so were the powers that be at Prime Video: 

“For some crazy reason, Standards has a policy against bestiality. They’re so uptight, really,” The Boys showrunner Erik Kripke explained to TV Line. “The discussion of that scene and how we pulled off that scene actually triggered a lot of alarm bells at a lot of different levels at Amazon because you’re not supposed to show people f–king animals, and I get it.”

Of course, Kripke wasn’t one to let a little thing like standards stop him from getting the scene onscreen: 

“My pitch to them was always like it’s so absurd [that] it wouldn’t be out of place in a Farrelly brothers movie. So it’s hard to call it prurient bestiality. It’s ridiculous. To my knowledge, I don’t even think octopi have orifices down there. So there was a lot of discussion of like what are the shots, and what can we do and what can we get away with?”

The interviewer confirms that Chace Crawford shot the sequence with a puppet, which The Boys VFX team later transformed into a live octopus through CGI. So really, if you think about it, the most ridiculous thing about this human-octopus sex scene was probably all the grown adults sitting around debating how to do it. 

Funny enough, The Boys episode that follows “Herogasm” gets even more depraved, as Deep has a threesome with his wife and an Octopus, which gets VERY awkward. It’s even more absurdly hilarious that this entire Season 3 subplot about The Deep’s Octopus fetish has already earned The Boys some distinguished recognition from PETA. 

The Boys Season 3 streams new episodes Fridays on Prime Video.