The Boys New Version of The Legend Isn’t Inspired by Stan Lee

Spoilers for this week’s episode of The Boys! Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic series has finally arrived at one of the wildest characters from its source material, The Legend. In the pages of the original comics, The Legend was a source for Butcher that previously worked at Vought and had all the dirt on every superhero imaginable, he was also a very thinly veiled parody of Marvel’s Stan Lee. For the Amazon TV series though the character, played by genre fan-favorite Paul Reiser (fresh off a return in Stranger Things), is clearly influenced by someone else.

When The Legend is revealed in the series it’s clear that he already has a relationship with both MM and Butcher, but his apartment isn’t adorned with comic books or much supe memorabilia, it’s full of Hollywood photos. This version of The Legend makes it clear that he was wheelin’ and dealin’ in the movies produced at Vought, particularly in the 1970s which is how he and Soldier Boy got to be such good friends. So if this isn’t Stan Lee, and it clearly isn’t, who is it? The TV version of The Legend sure seems to be based on…ahem, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans. 

Evans was at one time the head of production at Paramount Pictures, getting classics like as Rosemary’s Baby, Serpico, The Italian Job, Chinatown, True Grit, and the first two parts of The Godfather on the big screen, among countless others. He wasn’t without plenty of controversies though, having been convicted of cocaine trafficking in the 1980s among other illicit deeds. His autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, secured his status as a wisecracking smooth talker with colorful language though.

So how does he compare to The Legend in The Boys? He makes countless references to his time in charge of VP, but also his many sexual conquests, another thing he has in common with Evans. Oh yeah, and The Legend also notes that he’s writing his memoir. Plus there’s the uncanny resemblance, see it for yourself below.

STILL don’t believe it? Series creator Eric Kripke confirmed it in an interview with Nerdist, telling the site: “In the comics Garth (Ennis) very definitively based The Legend on Stan Lee, and that was because Garth was living in a comic book world. The comic books were the huge media in that universe, so it makes sense that Stan Lee was the head of that. But in our world, movies and television are the primary source of superhero media. When you think of a producer from the ’70s and ’80s you land on Robert Evans pretty quickly. Paul and I spoke about it and it was a very conscious tribute to Robert Evans.”

New episodes of The Boys arrive on Amazon Prime Video every Friday, three episodes remain in the third season.

(Photo by Gregg DeGuire/WireImage)